Darla, the owner, had a low-end commercial coffee machine and made fresh donuts every morning. It was her one saving grace. If it weren’t for those freaking donuts, she’d have no business at all.

I shrugged, dusting powdered sugar off my fingers. “It’s going,” I said. I was the queen of evasive. But the woman with shrewd eyes behind wire rimmed glasses was entirely too astute for my defensive tactics.

“You’re loving it,” Julie Waterman stated with a small smile after wiping a bead of coffee from her upper lip.

Julie Waterman was in her early forties but dressed like somebody’s grandma. She was pushy and in your face and exactly the type of person that drove me bat shit crazy. But I liked her. As much as I was capable of liking anyone.

She was the foster care worker who had been assigned my case when I was only six years old. She had been fresh out of college and was one of those idealistic, change the world types.

I remembered so little about my early childhood. Flashes of memories here and there. Most of what I remembered was ugly. Being taken out of my home after being found alone. I had been abandoned by my mother five days previously. I had been eating things out of the cabinet that I could reach and by the time police broke down the door, I was starving and dehydrated. Apparently, the school had alerted the authorities, saying they hadn’t seen me in a while and my mother hadn’t called me in sick.

I remembered the first horrible foster home I had lived in. There had been three older children who resented the sudden appearance of a young girl, who refused to talk. A shadow child who had been rendered mute by her experiences.

The eldest girl would pinch me when her mother wasn’t looking, leaving bruises on my pale skin. The boy, who was only a few years older than me, would lock me in closets. Sometimes for hours, until their mother would come looking for me.

My foster mother never asked why I was sat huddled in a closet with the door locked from the outside. She turned the other cheek when her three children spat in my food so I couldn’t eat my dinner. She ignored the names they called me under their breath. The nasty truths they’d throw at me when they thought she was out of hearing.

Your mom didn’t want you.

We don’t want you.

No one will ever love you.

Those were harsh words for a child to hear. Especially one who had already been to hell.

And I never said anything to anyone about the way they treated me. I kept it buried deep inside me. I never cried. I never screamed. I never spoke.

Mostly because I went almost an entire year without saying anything.

My words had failed me. I had nothing to say. So I kept silent, lost in the world inside my head.

But smashed in between those memories were those of a young social worker with kind eyes and a soft voice who refused to give up on me. Julie had been my one and only constant in a chaotic, out of control life. She tried really hard to make up for the shitty hand I had been dealt, but she could only do so much.

I had seen how much it hurt her when my foster families couldn’t handle me anymore and invariably sent me back. I knew it broke her heart each and every time she had to pick me up, sometimes in the middle of the night, and take me to yet another home that didn’t want me.

I remembered the way she bit down on her lip to stop the tears from falling as I curled into a ball on her backseat, my stuffed dog, Clyde, tucked beneath my shirt. She hadn’t wanted me to see the grief on her face. But I had. Even if my own grief had bled out of me a long time ago.

She had tried to turn my life around. She got me counseling. She tried to coax me into sitting through support groups. She insisted that I get evaluation after evaluation to determine what exactly was wrong with me. To get answers to why I was unable to connect with anyone or anything. To find out if what was broken inside me could ever be fixed.

When I was seven, some therapist diagnosed me with Reactive Attachment Disorder brought on by a lack of nurturing and my traumatic past. My label did nothing to make me any more loveable or easier to deal with.

Even armed with the understanding of what made me the way I was, my foster families were never equipped to handle the angry, violent girl who had invaded their homes.

So I would have to leave. I never settled. I never allowed myself to get comfortable. Because I knew it would be over soon enough. Even the nice ones never lasted long.

My life had been a series of temporary situations.

But Julie continued to try. I’d give her that.

And I could still see the disappointment on her face when I was carted off to juvie six years ago. Her tears were the only ones that fell.

So now, even though I had outgrown her services years ago, she still insisted on “touching base” with me every few months. And living in a small town, we ran into each other a lot more than that.

It wasn’t a coincidence that she stopped by on my shifts at JAC’s, even though she lived and worked across town.

And she, more than most people, knew when I was bullshitting and evading. She sipped on her coffee, a brown lock of hair flopping in her face.

“You do. I can tell. I’m so glad!” she enthused and I knew a grilling session was imminent.

I rolled my eyes but didn’t deny her statement. What was the point? She was right.

“Are you going to take any more classes?” Julie asked, dumping more sugar into her coffee.

“Let’s just take one day at a time, okay?” I said watching her over the rim of my tea mug.

Julie was saying something. Her mouth was moving but I didn’t hear the sounds coming out. Because at that moment the bell tinkled above the door and I nonchalantly lifted my eyes toward the momentary distraction.