Then she looked at me.
“Are you doing homework?”
I laughed.
“Something like that.”
She reached into her box of crayons and pulled out a handful.
Then she placed half of them beside my laptop.
“You can have these,” she said.
I smiled.
“Thanks.”
“So you can do your homework too.”
I pulled the laptop closer.
For a moment, I looked at my little sister sitting beside me with her crayons scattered across the table.
Three months earlier, I had carried her out of a burning house.
Since then, I had spent every day trying to give her a safe life.
I had believed that protecting her meant sacrificing my own future.
But that wasn’t necessarily true.
I could take care of Vicky.
And I could still build a life of my own.
Denise had tried to convince everyone that I was just a nineteen-year-old boy who didn’t know what he was doing.
She was wrong.
I knew exactly what I was doing.
I was keeping a promise I had never needed to say out loud.
I was making sure my little sister would never again wonder whether someone was coming back for her.
And this time, I wasn’t giving up my future to do it.
I was going to fight for both.
