Best Kept Secret (Rochester Trilogy 3)

I hope she would have.

“It feels wrong,” I admit to Beau halfway through my second year. “Like I’m not struggling enough for this. Like I should be doing more, or trying harder.”

He leans against the countertop in our kitchen. Snow comes down outside in fat flakes. We’re four days from winter break and all I want is to sleep in. My days are wall-to-wall busy with classes and study groups and reading textbooks.

“You made the dean’s list again,” he says. “What more do you think you need to do?”

He hung Christmas lights last week. They’re multicolored, stretched across the roof of the porch. We live in this house on the coast with Christmas lights on the porch. “Maybe I don’t deserve it. It was going to be a difficult thing, you know?”

He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me in for a kiss. “You don’t have to suffer for something to be worth it. You deserve peace.”

Hearing him say it goes straight to my heart. “I thought it would be kind of awful and exhausting, but then I’d have earned it.”

“You did earn it.”

“But—”

“You earned it with every book you read, every test you take. You earn it with every ounce of determination in your beautiful little body. Now, do you want to argue or do you want to go to bed?”

“It’s too early to go to bed.”

“It’s too early to go to sleep. I have other plans for you.”

How am I supposed to resist him when he’s like this?

The first year finishes. I’m not much older than my classmates, but I’m the only one who lives so far away from campus. Most of the students in my study group live in the city. They rent apartments together. They attend parties. I expect to feel jealous that I’m missing out on that part of the college experience, but I don’t. I like Beau’s steadiness. He’s there for me whenever I need him. No frat party with red cups could compare with that.

In the second year, we have to choose an internship. I land one at a local charity that puts together welcome baskets for foster children. So often they show up at temporary homes with no extra clothes, no toothbrushes, nothing. The baskets include the necessities, along with a teddy bear. It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done, and I’m only an intern.

What I find is that every case is as emotionally charged as it was with Paige when I first came to Coach House. Tensions run high in the families we work with. In the children who have to be placed into foster care, but also in the parents. Everyone struggles. My days are filled with shadowing placement calls and picking up supplies and going over paperwork that my boss delegates to me. There is a lot of paperwork, and it’s always changing.

Kids have to be moved from one place to another. They always need things.

It’s heartbreaking to see them. Their worry. Their anger. Their fear.

I arrive home one spring evening with red, swollen eyes. Swiping at them with the back of my hand does nothing. Beau’s going to know I was crying. I don’t want him to think this is too much for me. I don’t want him to think I’m not happy. But today was a tough one.

It was a boy who’d come into the system right when I was starting my internship. I’d given him the basket, then returned the next day with a deck of cards. He wanted to be a magician, he said, so that he could be invisible. He guessed which card I picked out of the deck.

He must have ended up back with his birth parents. That’s the ending we hope for with foster care, if the parents are alive. That they’ll be returned. But so often it doesn’t work. The parents relapse. The neglect continues. Or worse.

That night he shows up again, his cheek darkened with a bruise.

Beau’s lamp is on in his office as I climb the steps, but he meets me at the door. Wordlessly, he takes me into his arms and holds me tight.

“You know,” I say, my voice thick. “This was my dream.”

I didn’t know it would feel like this to achieve everything I ever wanted. I didn’t know it would involve red eyes and an aching heart. I didn’t realize, somehow, that it would mean missing all these kids I’ve worked with. This is only an internship. If I keep doing this, it’ll mean years of saying goodbye. Years of sad memories.

“Is it still your dream?”

“Yes. But I thought I’d be able to turn it off somehow.”

“You, turn off your heart? That’s what makes you so good at this. The day you stop feeling things is the day you should retire.”

“I never want to retire. The work is too important.”