Page 57 of Sin Bin

She hesitated. “Because of what happened at my previous foster home.”

“What happened?”

She swallowed tightly, her insides twisting as the buried memories came rushing to the surface. “I was living with a woman named Ms. Bellamy. She was horrible, one of the cruelest people I’d ever met. She didn’t become a foster mother out of the kindness of her heart. She only did it for the checks. She didn’t have a nurturing bone in her body. In fact, she seemed to get some kind of sick pleasure from torturing and humiliating us. Sometimes she’d fix dinner for herself and let us starve. Other times she and her boyfriend would get fast food and sit there chowing down in front of us. On one of those occasions, one of the older girls got fed up and marched into the kitchen to cook something for us to eat. Ms. Bellamy flew into a rage. She snatched a bag of rice out of the girl’s hands, ripped it open and poured rice all over the floor. Then she made all of us strip down to our underwear and kneel on the uncooked rice for hours.”

“Jesus,” Logan hissed in angry disgust. “What a sadistic fuck.”

She nodded, agreeing with him. “I shared a room with this girl named Meghan. She was a year younger than me. We used to call ourselves ‘the M&Ms.’ She was so pretty and sweet, and she had the most beautiful dark skin,” Meadow recalled with a smile. “It was so radiant and smooth. I wanted her complexion so bad, I used to pray for it.” Her smile faded slowly as she continued her story. “For some reason, Ms. Bellamy hated Meghan and me even more than the other kids. She used to call me a weirdo, make fun of my name, yank me by my hair and slap me for the slightest infraction. She was just as cruel to Meghan, calling her horrible names and making all sorts of derogatory jokes about her dark skin.” Meadow shook her head, her stomach clenching with hot anger. “I hated that woman so damn much.”

“With good fucking reason.” Logan’s voice was a low growl, his fury palpable.

She forced herself to go on. “One night we were in our room doing our homework when Ms. Bellamy came bursting through the door. She was yelling and accusing us of stealing her new bottle of perfume. She started ransacking the room, tearing everything apart. When I told her we hadn’t stolen anything, she backhanded me so hard that I hit the wall and fell to the floor. She kicked me twice in the stomach, then turned around and started beating up Meghan.”

Meadow’s jaw tightened, her nostrils flaring with emotion. “She was sobbing and begging Ms. Bellamy to stop. But she wouldn’t. She was in such a rage, I thought she was going to kill Meghan. I got up and tried to push her off Meghan, but she was too strong. I saw a pair of craft scissors on the desk. I didn’t think. I just grabbed them and stabbed Ms. Bellamy in the arm. I wasn’t trying to seriously injure her. I just wanted to stun her enough to make her stop hitting Meghan.”

She drew a shaky breath before continuing. “I watched her grab her bleeding arm and run screaming out of the room. She called my caseworker and told her that I had just attacked her and tried to kill her. She said she didn’t feel safe and wanted me gone immediately. Then she hung up the phone and forcefully dragged me outside, making me wait in the rain until CPS arrived. I was removed from her home that night, and of course the incident went in my case file. Because I’d used a weapon on my foster parent, I was labeled ‘violence prone.’ That was the last foster home I was placed in.”

“Shit,” Logan whispered, his voice harsh with fury. “That abominable bitch.”

“She was abominable. Horrifically so.” Meadow let out a slow, painful breath and shook her head. “That’s how I ended up at the group home with you.”

Logan’s gaze was filled with raw compassion. “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely. “I’m so fucking sorry that happened to you.”

She nodded and blinked back a sting of tears.

“What happened to Meghan? Please tell me they got her away from that fucking monster?”

“They did,” Meadow assured him. “But not right away. By the time my caseworker arrived that night, Mrs. Bellamy had cleaned up Meghan’s face and concocted a story about her getting beat up by a bully at school. My right eye was nearly swollen shut, so she had to come clean about slapping me. But she claimed that I attacked her first. I told my caseworker that she was lying through her teeth, but none of the other kids backed me up. She’d probably threatened them while I was waiting outside. Not even poor Meghan was saying a word. She was scared, you know? Scared of Ms. Bellamy. Scared to be placed in an even worse foster home. Thankfully my caseworker opened an investigation, and Meghan and the other kids were eventually removed from Ms. Bellamy’s home.” Meadow sighed. “The good news is that she lost her foster care license. The bad news is that she was never charged with child abuse or neglect.”

“Of course she wasn’t,” Logan said with bitter scorn. “People like that have no fucking business being entrusted with the care of children. Yet somehow they always manage to slip through the cracks and escape punishment for their crimes.”

Meadow studied Logan’s ferocious expression. She knew he had to be speaking from personal experience. Before she could probe further, he turned away and stared out across the lake to the distant mountains.

After a long stretch of silence, she whispered, “Did you used to pretend to see your mother?”

Slowly he turned his head to stare at her. His dark eyes were haunted, his features strained. “What?”

“I used to see my parents,” she explained. “I used to pretend they were still with me, helping me with my homework, tucking me into bed at night, taking me to the planetarium. They seemed so real, I felt as if I could reach out and touch them. But then reality would intrude and…” She trailed off with a mournful little smile. “Maybe they really were there. My adoptive mother used to tell me that our departed loved ones visit us sometimes. To comfort us and let us know they’re okay.”

Logan was deathly silent.

Meadow gave him a long, searching look. “So…did you have a Ms. Bellamy?”

He glanced away from her. She could feel the tight web of tension radiating from him, giving her an answer even before he said in a very low, contained voice, “I’d rather not talk about it.”

She nodded, trying not to feel stung at his unwillingness to share with her after she’d opened up to him.

He took a deep breath, his shoulders expanding before they relaxed again. “It’s not that I don’t want to confide in you. I do. It’s just…hard to talk about the past. And I want us to bond over more than our fucked-up childhoods.”

“I understand,” she said softly.

The night breeze picked up along the lake and stirred her hair, blowing the dark strands around her face. They stood quietly for a long time, gazing up at the stars twinkling from an endless sea of black velvet.

Logan’s soft, reminiscing voice broke the silence. “Remember that time I woke up in the middle of the night and found you stargazing in the backyard? You wanted to get rid of me, so you started reciting a bunch of facts about the solar system.”

Meadow let out a quiet laugh and shook her head. “I was hoping you’d get bored and leave me alone. But you didn’t. You stuck around just to annoy me.”

“Yup.” His grin was a flash of white in his shadowed face. “You enjoyed my company. Admit it.”

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