Chapter 1: Nobody at the Gate

Hazel stepped through the iron gate and did not look back.

"Sign first," the guard called after her.

She went back and signed. Her hand still shook when she wrote in front of people—three years of being watched while she did simple things had done that to her. The pen was a real pen, not the stub of pencil they handed out on exam days, and it felt strange between her fingers.

"Your bag." Director Hollis stood in the office doorway and held it out at arm's length, as if Hazel might be catching. "Check it now. Do not come back later and say something is missing."

Hazel opened it on the spot. A gray sweater. A pair of jeans. A hair tie. She held the jeans against her legs and the hems stopped well above her ankles. She had been sixteen when she handed them over, and she had kept growing since.

At the bottom lay a photo of her grandmother in a frame with a crack across one corner. Grandma Mae stood in front of the vegetable garden, squinting at the sun with one hand on her hip. Hazel pressed her thumb over the crack.

"It came in like that," Hollis said.

"I did not say anything."

"Good. Your guardian was told today's date, twice, by letter. Somebody will come."

"No one is coming," Hazel said.

Hollis frowned. "Do not be dramatic."

"I am not." Hazel zipped the bag. "It is just true."

It was true, and she had known it for a long time. In the first year, she wrote a letter every week and checked the visitor list every Sunday. Nothing came back, and her name was never on the list. In the second year she stopped checking. In the third year, she stopped writing. She did not remember deciding to stop. One Sunday she noticed she had not looked up when the door opened, and that she felt nothing about it, and that was how she knew it was finished.

The office door shut. The guard went back to his chair and his phone.

Hazel sat on her bag at the edge of the road and went over her plan. It was a small one. First, a bed behind a door that locked from the inside. Second, her papers: her birth certificate and the old ID that had come with her from the countryside. Third, her grandmother's ring, which she had hidden in a drawer in her old room. After that, she would leave. She had no money and nowhere to go, and the only place on earth that owed her a night's sleep was the house that had sent her here. It was not hope. It was arithmetic.

A truck rattled by, and she did not look up. A woman on a bicycle passed, glanced at her sweater and the cracked photo on her knee, then looked away quickly. Hazel pulled her sleeves down over her wrists. They did not reach far anymore.

She thought about Lily. Lily was somewhere behind that wall, in the dormitory with the broken window that let in the rain. Lily was seventeen and wrote with her left hand because the right one had been caught in a door by a supervisor. On the last night she had held Hazel's wrist and said, "You will come back for me, right?" Hazel had said yes. She had said it fast, before she could think. Now she was out, with no money and a promise she did not know how to keep, and that was the only thing in the world that still scared her. Her family could not hurt her anymore. Failing Lily could.

The shadows grew long. By the time the sky turned orange, her stomach hurt badly enough that she had to bend forward to breathe. She had eaten a thin porridge before dawn and nothing since. In the dorm, she would have hidden half of it in her sleeve for later. She still wanted to save some, even now.

"Hey." The guard stood over her. "You cannot stay here after dark. It is a rule."

"I know." Hazel got up slowly, because standing too fast made the road tilt. "Can I use a phone? One call. I need a ride."

"Your people are not coming?"

"No."

He looked at her, and then at the clipboard, and then at the sky. He sighed. "Make it quick. And do not tell Hollis."

The office smelled of old coffee and floor cleaner. A calendar hung on the wall with today's date circled in red. Someone had written RELEASE next to it in block capitals. Hazel looked at the red circle for a while. Everyone here had known the date, the staff, the guard, Hollis, and whoever filled in the calendar. It was strange to be the only person for whom it came as no event at all.

The phone was heavy and black. She dialed the number she had never forgotten. Her fingers remembered it faster than her head did. It rang four times, five, six.

"Whitmore residence."

It was a woman's voice, hurried, and behind it was a roar of noise. Music. Glasses. A burst of laughter that rose and fell.

"This is Hazel," she said. "I need to speak to Mrs. Whitmore."

"Madam is busy. Big party. Call tomorrow." The woman stopped. "Who?"

"Hazel."

Behind the maid, a microphone squealed, and then a man's voice came over the room, warm and proud. Hazel knew it at once. It was her father, and she had never heard him sound like that when he talked to her.

"Everyone, please raise your glasses. Tonight is a special night for our family. Our Vivi starts at Hartwell University next week, and her mother and I cannot tell you how proud we are." A pause, and when he spoke again his voice cracked, which was the part she had not expected. He was crying. "To our one and only daughter."

"To Vivi!" the room shouted.

Hazel stood with the phone against her ear and waited for it to hit her.

It did, but it landed small and far away, like a blow through thick wool. What troubled her was what she did not feel. She was not angry. She was not even surprised. In her first months at Ridgeway, a sentence like that would have kept her awake for a week, staring at the ceiling and picking at it. Now it was only information. She stood there, and she was tired, and under the tiredness there was a flat quiet that frightened her more than any pain.

Then her mother laughed.

It was a bright, easy laugh, and it carried all the way down the line. Hazel had forgotten her mother had a good laugh. She had not heard it once in the six months she lived in that house.

Her throat closed. She swallowed hard until it opened again.

On the line, the noise dulled as if a door had shut. "Hazel?" the woman whispered. It was Rosa, she realized, the maid who used to slip her extra bread. "Is that you?"

"Yes."

"They said you were not coming out until next year. Madam told everyone."

"It does not matter," Hazel said. Her voice sounded steady, and she was glad. "They would not have come anyway."

There was a long silence. Then Rosa made a small, broken sound, and said, "I am sorry," and it was the first time in three years anyone had said those words to her and sounded like she meant them.

Hazel gripped the edge of the desk. This was the thing she had not prepared for. She had armored herself against her father's toast and her mother's laugh. She had no defense at all against one kind voice on a bad phone line, and her eyes began to sting.

"Wait," Rosa said. "Do not hang up."