Page 96 of Over the Edge

Lindsey pushed up the corners of her mouth. “Maybe sitting isn’t the best idea. I expect you have chores to take care of the day before the holiday, like everyone else does.”

His eyebrows dipped into a V, and when he spoke, his words were slow and careful. As if he was weighing each one. “I do have to make a green bean casserole for dinner at my sister’s tomorrow. It was a staple at every family holiday gathering for as long as I can remember. One of Mom’s specialties. My foster mom’s, that is. My birth mother ... Lorraine ... she didn’t cook much.”

Was that an opening? Did he want her to ask a few questions, help guide him along whatever path he wanted to go down?

She slid onto one of the stools and approached with caution. “That fits with what you mentioned earlier, about learning to cook out of necessity.”

“Yeah.” After a nanosecond of hesitation, he circled theisland and took the stool beside her, resting an elbow on the countertop as he angled toward her. “I learned to forage from a very young age.”

“How young?”

He gave her a taut shrug. “As far back as I can remember, to some degree. More so after I was seven. Lorraine was an indifferent mom at best, a terrible one at worst.” His fingers curled into a ball, and a muscle ticced in his jaw. “She had huge, unpredictable mood swings and delusions. She always thought someone was trying to break into our apartment, and she’d tell me to watch the door. If I got distracted, she’d fly into a rage and punish me. I don’t remember when that started, but the pattern was well-established by the time I was four.”

Shock rippled through her. “That’s far too young to be given any sort of responsibility.”

“Not according to Lorraine.”

Lindsey wasn’t certain she wanted to hear the answer to her next question, but she asked it anyway. “How did she punish you?”

A subtle quiver rippled through him. Easy to miss if she hadn’t been watching closely. “She’d drag me up to the roof of our apartment, dangle me over the edge, and threaten to drop me.” His voice hoarsened, and he cleared his throat. Swallowed.

Lindsey stopped breathing.

How did a person survive that kind of abuse and grow up to be normal, aside from an understandable fear of heights?

“Where was your father during all this?”

“I have no idea. He was never part of my life. There’s no father listed on my birth certificate.”

“And no one knew about the abuse?” She gently rested her fingers on top of his clenched fist.

He looked down at their connected hands. “My grandmother caught her doing it one day when I was five. Notlong after that, she moved in with us, and life got calmer—and safer. She watched out for me. Loved me. Cared for me. Showed me the only kindness I’d ever known. She died when I was seven, but those two years with her saved me.”

“Did your mom go back to punishing you after she died?”

“Not with the roof routine. I was big enough at that age to fight her off. So she stopped taking care of me. I subsisted on cereal and canned goods, learned to do my own laundry, cleaned my own room. That’s when I vowed someday to learn to cook so I never had to eat cereal again.”

Jack’s story was even more of a nightmare than what she’d been living through these past three weeks.

“How did you end up in foster care? Did someone finally report your birth mother?”

“No. She abandoned me the summer I turned eight. Left one day and never came back. For two months, I lived alone, eating from garbage cans after the food in the apartment ran out.”

An eight-year-old left to survive on his own?

Unbelievable.

“Your neighbors didn’t notice what was going on?”

He barked out a mirthless laugh. “Where we lived, everybody kept to themselves. These weren’t the type of people who wanted anyone to know their business.”

“So how did foster care enter the picture?”

“We got thrown out of the apartment. Turns out Lorraine hadn’t paid the rent for months. An eviction notice came, but I couldn’t read all the big words. The first I knew about it was when I came home one day after scavenging for food and found the front door locked and all our stuff on the sidewalk.”

Merciful heaven.

The story kept getting worse and worse.

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