Camille ripped her arm free. “You have no idea what you’re interfering with.”
Adeline looked at her — and thought of the two white tablets hidden in a specimen bag inside the toe of an old shoe upstairs. The photographs on her phone. The medication cabinet opened at two in the morning. A bottle whose label said one thing while everything inside it said another.
Camille was wrong. Adeline knew exactly what she was interfering with. She just didn’t know yet how many people were involved.
Three months earlier, the phone call that brought Adeline Marsh into the Alfieri house had felt like a miracle. Her tiny apartment in Cicero doubled as desk, dining table, and medication station, and that afternoon two pieces of paper lay on the kitchen table: another rejection from a financial assistance program, and her seven-year-old brother Wes’s appointment card — with two surgery dates already crossed out.
Wes had been born with a heart defect. There was a treatment. There was a surgeon. There was simply a number standing between her brother and both of those things.