That was the kind of morning it was.
The kind where your stomach burned, your pride hurt worse than your hunger, and every grown-up face around you looked either suspicious, tired, or already turned away.
Riley stood at the edge of the crowd outside Red Oak Storage with her hands shoved into the pockets of a gray hoodie that used to belong to her mother. She was nineteen, though most people guessed twenty-five because of the hard set of her mouth and the permanent strain around her eyes. Beside her stood Noah, fifteen, all elbows and restless energy, with dark hair falling into his face and the kind of hopeful expression Riley had spent the last year trying not to crush.
The two of them had been sleeping in their mother’s old Chevy Impala for three weeks.
Before that, they had bounced between a church shelter, two motels paid by weekly cash, and one couch that disappeared the moment the owner’s boyfriend got out of county jail. Their mother had died the year before after a fast, ugly illness that took every dollar they had and left them with debt, a car that barely started, and no family interested in taking both of them together. Their father had vanished long before that, somewhere between a poker table and a promise.
Social services had told Riley there were “options.”
What they meant was this: Noah could go into foster care, and Riley could disappear into whatever adult trouble came next.
