Double Time ✓

epilogue

CALLUM CUTS THE ENGINE OF his car.

He and Isabella have parked across the road from the Irving house, white wood shingles and brown roof tiles. When she first asked him for a ride to visit her old foster family—a little nervous, too quick to say that he didn't have to if he didn't have the time—he was overcome with pride. From what she's told him about her upbringing in foster care, and what else that he had to infer from close observation, Callum knows that revisiting her past is frightening. He wanted nothing more than to be there for her.

He gives her hand a squeeze over the gearshift. "Take your time. I will wait here."

"Are you sure? You could go visit the town center if you like. It's cute, lots of thrift stores and cafés."

This town, called Splendid (and it is), is twenty-five minutes from Carsonville. Depending on his mood, Callum finds it either sad or strange or serendipitous that when he was a teenager, teenage Bay was growing up only a short drive away. It gets him thinking about human beings all living lives parallel to each other, sometimes intertwining crossing over, sometimes changing each other's lives forever. It gets him wondering if they were in the same crowd at one point, sitting on the same bus, one shoulder brushing past another.

"I'm sure," he says. "I'll stay right here."

Isabella gives him a weak, grateful smile and exits the car. Before this visit came the phone call, and before the phone call she simply messaged Marlon Irving on Facebook. It was fear that kept her away all these years. To her, the Irvings represent one of the best periods in her childhood. It was a period of safety, stability and self-discovery. She felt like a person in this house.

But to the Irvings, who knew? They'd been fostering for years before her and years after her, and Isabella was always painfully conscious that she was nothing. She was not a daughter, or a sister. She was temporary, a state-delivered paycheck. They say to never meet your heroes. She had never wanted to visit only to see vacant stares and hear obligatory well-wishes. She had never wanted to love anyone more than they loved her back. Never had the courage, till now.

She knocks on the door. Through the frosted glass windows in the door, she sees Tanya striding down the hallway, a smudge of brown and purple. Tanya opens the door smiling, hair cut shorter, waist a little rounder. "Oh, baby, hello," she says, folding Isabella in to a hug.

She smells exactly the same.

Isabella returns the hug, smiling. "Hi, Tanya."

"I'm so happy you made it today. Welcome back."

"Thank you," she says, and when she steps inside it is instantly familiar. She knows to take her shoes off and place them on the rack in the foyer. She knows the way to the kitchen, where a cutting board piled with diced vegetables rests on the counter, and knows to sit at the dining table and tuck one leg up under her like she always used to do.

"Marlon is grilling," Tanya says, retaking her position at the cutting board. "You can say hi, but I want you to come back and sit with me so we can catch up. Or you could go out later, whatever makes you happy."

"Yes, ma'am." Isabella is grinning now. How lovely when things change less than one had dreaded.

She follows the sharp scent of smoke and tangy barbecue into the backyard. Marlon, once her foster brother, now a twenty-something with a job and a girlfriend and a cat, is standing over the grill. He's tied an apron loosely over his front, and Isabella knows from just the faded blue and white striped straps that it will say BARBECUTIE on the front.

"I can't believe that apron never got thrown out," Isabella says.

Marlon turns around and grins. Indeed, she sees the palimpsest of various stains—coffee brown to a suspicious yellow and even some magenta ink—that she expected. Barbecutie, too.