Chapter One
Mia didn’t see the patch of gravel until it was too late. She fought for control as her Honda Rebel skidded across the double yellow line with a cargo van headed right for her. Heart pounding, she downshifted and pulled onto the opposite shoulder beneath a thick canopy of trees that shaded her from the late afternoon sun.
Breathless, she eased her helmet free and shuddered as a breeze brushed across her face and short-cropped hair.
She felt her cell phone vibrate from her leather jacket. Maybe it was Moon Harvest calling to say the job was hers. The interview had run long, but she took that as a good sign. They were interested enough to look beyond her sexual identity, skin color, and the four-year gap since her last marketing job.
Still rattled from her near collision, Mia took a deep breath and removed her phone with a trembling hand.
It wasn’t Moon Harvest. Far from it. It was TJ, her half-brother.
They hadn’t spoken in years.
Mia stared at the phone in her open palm, her thumb hovering over the keypad as she considered answering the call.
A dried maple leaf, cupped into a tiny fist, tumbled across the gravel toward her and stopped at her feet. She looked from the leaf to the incoming number and swiped.
“Yes?” she said, clenching her free hand. She’d lived nearly as many years in the US as she had in Haiti, yet her English still carried a heavy Creole accent.
“Mia?”
It took a moment for her to register his voice, so much deeper than when they spoke last.
“TJ. Hello,” Mia said, her voice wavering. She still hadn’t had time to recover from her near wipe-out. Now, hearing TJ’s voice, it was all she could do to breathe.
TJ must have noticed something was off because the next thing he said was, “Are you okay?”
Mia looked up at the vibrant leaves overhead, fluttering in the cool breeze. “I’m fine.”
“I have some bad news,” TJ said. Mia’s imagination splintered in a dozen directions. Bad news could mean poor grades, a lost wallet, a flat tire. Or it could mean something far worse. “It’s Ellis. He’s in the hospital. He had a massive stroke.”
Their father. The man who’d abandoned Mia’s mother when he learned she was carrying his child. A man Mia neither loved nor respected. She called him by his last name because he’d told her to, but she soon learned that everyone called him Ellis, even his mother.
“I don’t know what to say.” This was as frank as Mia ever got. No matter how deep her feelings, she couldn’t articulate them. It was a point of friction between Mia and her girlfriend, Kali, whose I love you often went unanswered.
TJ sighed, exasperated. “How about, ‘How is he?’ Or, ‘Is there anything I can do?’” He paused. “Ellis is in bad shape, Mia. He may not have long.”
“Where are you?” Mia asked. “Where is . . . he?”
“He’s in the hospital here in Meridian. I’m at the cottage. You should be here, too.”
“TJ, I—”
“You’ll regret not seeing him if anything happens.”
“I’ll add it to the list,” Mia said. TJ didn’t answer right away, but Mia sensed the gears turning as he, like her, recalled their last conversation.
“We all have regrets,” he said, finally.
Mia wondered if he was letting her off the hook, letting bygones be bygones for Ellis’s sake. Ellis.
She owed him nothing. It was Ellis’s fault Mia turned her back on the family home. The incident with TJ only fanned the flames.
“So?” TJ said. “Are you coming?”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
Mia cruised into Drake, recalling the night TJ was arrested for selling cocaine at a high school dance. He’d asked for her help, and she’d let him down, calling Ellis, their father, after TJ explicitly told her not to. But Mia was at an Occupy Chicago demonstration hours away with her college friends. Not only did she not have a car; she had class the next day. Calling Ellis was her only option.
They hadn’t spoken since.
Now, she had an opportunity to patch things up with TJ. That alone should be a reason to go to Meridian. But seeing Ellis again—
She made a lap around the town square, passing a block of scaffolding across from Drake Park. Drake was still rebuilding after a massive fire months earlier, when a white supremacist group had converged on the small Iowa town and turned it on its head. The community had pushed back, but Mia still looked over her shoulder for anyone with menace in their eyes.
Mia parked her bike at the curb outside her apartment building, thinking of that look—that flash of evil that preceded trouble. Her heart clenched as she recalled her youth in Haiti and the man she’d believed was the devil himself.
The October wind kicked up, and Mia shivered as she climbed the stairs to her apartment, each step heavier than the last. Once inside, she tossed her keys on the shelf by the door and dropped her backpack and helmet on the floor.
Mia tuned out the muted sound of a car alarm down the street and an emotional argument from the apartment upstairs as she regarded her ghostly reflection in the picture window over the sofa.
The short hair was new—an impulsive decision made in the barber chair before the interview that morning. She’d long ago given up the braids she’d worn as a child. That had been another impulse, shedding her old self and her old life in Haiti. As a teenager, her hair had grown into a wild mass of curls, like a halo.
But now the halo was gone. An adult stared back at her. The spitting image of her mother.
Beyond her reflection in the window, Mia had a view of the Old Oak standing guard in the center of the town square. At its feet was a plaque proclaiming that spot as the Center of the World. A boast derived from the fact that the tree was in the center of the park in the center of town in the center of the United States. Like ripples on a pond.
In Drake, Mia was “that Black foreign lesbian who works in the toy shop.” Black. Foreign. Lesbian. So many labels to wear. But there were many more her neighbors knew nothing about. “Poor thing,” she’d heard Mrs. Gardner say. But Mrs. Gardner didn’t know Mia’s father was white, or that she’d lived with the heavy mantle of being “mulatta” in a black world, and then in a white world. “Mixed race,” Americans liked to say, avoiding the Haitian slur Mia had endured as a child “don’t let that trouble you,” Mama would say. “You will always my Sunshine.” But once a mulatta, always a mulatta—that hateful word lived just below the skin. One more label for her to wear, and though she hadn’t heard it in years, she could still sense when someone was thinking it.
She had Kali, though. Mia grinned, thinking of how her Jewish girlfriend’s persistence had won her heart. They’d met the night of TJ’s desperate call seven years earlier. Both events had been equally life changing.
With a sigh, Mia picked her helmet off the floor and set it on the bookshelf separating the rest of her studio apartment from the kitchenette. She slipped off her jacket and draped it over a kitchen chair, then opened a bottle of Shiraz and poured herself a glass to ease her frayed nerves.
The day had taken a bizarre turn with TJ’s call. When her alarm went off that morning, Mia had leaped out of bed with a fire in her belly. The job at Moon Harvest was better than she’d ever expected to find in this small town. It would come with more responsibility than she’d had back in Chicago, where she’d risen to Chief Marketing Analyst less than two years out of college.
Working in Drake’s toy shop had its charm, but she’d only taken that job to be closer to Kali. And now she was ready to get her career back on track.
Her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket, and she jumped.
The interview.
She fumbled for the phone and answered before checking who the caller was. “Hello. Mia Ellis speaking.” It was silly. Mia never answered the phone this way, but she was nervous and wanted to appear professional.
There was a soft laugh, then, “Why hello, Mia Ellis. This is Kalinda Moon.” Mia could hear the playful tease in Kali’s voice. “What’s all the formality about?”
“Oh, hey,” Mia said, leaning back against the counter. “I thought it was about the job. Have you heard anything?”
“No, but I wouldn’t worry if I were you. You’re a shoo-in,” Kali said. “After all, it’s who you know, right?”
Not what you know. Mia hated that expression. She wanted to be judged on her merits, not on her relationship to the family. Moon Harvest was a legacy family business that made its fortune in the canning industry under the stewardship of Kali’s great grandfather, but now Kali’s brother, Eli, was resurrecting it as a fresh produce distribution center. Mia hoped to be part of that success.
“If you say so.” Mia sipped her wine, then reached for the open bottle to top off.
“We on for tomorrow?” Kali asked. “We have an appointment with the realtor.”
Mia fell silent, thinking of her lucrative job in Chicago, her apartment with a panoramic view of Lake Michigan—and how she’d given up both for Kali. But even that hadn’t been enough. Kali needed commitment, and Mia wasn’t ready to let go of her last hold on independence.
As a psychologist, Kali loved getting to the root of any problem. But Mia resisted sharing her problems, emotional or otherwise. Like Hispaniola, the place of her birth, Mia was an island. When disaster struck, she held firm, standing strong and self-reliant.
“I get it,” Kali said, breaking the silence, her voice suddenly strained. “You’re a loner. I can’t change that and don’t want to. I love you the way you are, but—I need more. Something that says you need me. Anything.”
Mia swirled the remaining wine in her glass, then finished it. Or what? Was this an ultimatum? No. Kali wasn’t like that. And Mia’s hesitance wasn’t just about her independence.
“My brother called,” she said. Kali knew about the rift with TJ. She’d been there when it happened, and even if Mia had never fully revealed how deeply it hurt her, she suspected Kali had some idea. “Ellis is in the hospital in Meridian,” Mia continued. “He had a stroke.”
“What? My God, Mia. Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
Mia shrugged. She hadn’t intended to say anything at all and immediately regretted her change of heart.
“You need to go to him,” Kali said excitedly. “You need to—”
“Stop,” Mia said. “Just—stop.”
“He’s your father, Mia.”
“Ellis is not like other fathers. He’s nothing like your dad was.” There was a long pause. Kali’s parents had drowned in a ferry accident six years earlier. It still weighed heavily on her and her brother. “Ellis and I were never close.”
“He’s your father,” Kali said—as if repeating herself would change Mia’s mind.
“You don’t understand,” Mia said. “You don’t know.”
“How could I? You shut me out! I don’t even know how you feel about me half the time.”
“I’m not like you.”
“I’m not saying that you have to be,” Kali said. “But maybe it would help if you could just let me in—let anyone in.”
Mia shared a sliver of her past with Kali after the riots in town that summer, cracking open the door to her Haitian childhood. Corruption, threats of violence, and the mayhem following the fire had brought back vivid memories of catastrophic storms and poverty in her homeland, a single mother who worked tirelessly to give Mia a home and security while fending off street gangs and enduring the swinging door of Haitian leadership.
“I’ve seen it all before,” she’d said thinking of the ugliness of her past, then buttoned up. But the memory of Uncle Jean’s leering eyes amid a throng of angry protesters could not be silenced. Nor could the stain on her innocence. If Mia said anything to Kali, she’d have to say it all, and she was unready, perhaps unable to speak about any of it. That was the world Ellis left her to.
Kali wanted to dive deeper into how Mia’s past inflicted indelible scars. She believed it was only by examining those scars that Mia could fully heal them and finally break out of her thick shell. After everything she’d been through, who wouldn’t want to keep that shell intact?
Mia regretted ever opening that door. She didn’t want Kali’s help. She didn’t want to remember all that—shit. And she especially didn’t want to drag it out for Kali’s examination. Kali had remarked early in their relationship that Mia was emotionally stunted.
Emotionally stunted? The words stung. Mia had never seen herself that way. She cared deeply about people and animals and supported every social cause. A bleeding-heart liberal to the core. Just because she struggled to open up with Kali didn’t mean she couldn’t, right?
“I love you, Mia,” Kali said. There it was. Kali’s secret weapon. That, and her disarming smile.
Mia stared into her empty wine glass, thinking of the magic words resting on the tip of her tongue. They should have been easy to say, but Mia couldn’t—though she’d loved Kali since first setting eyes on her in college. Kali Moon was beautiful, intelligent, and patient to a fault.
“You too,” Mia finally said.
After the call, Mia poured herself another glass of wine and cued up a recent playlist on her Bluetooth speaker. Joss Stone sang “Right To Be Wrong” while Mia sat at her kitchen table admiring her grandmother’s hand-embroidered tablecloth and a pair of sapphire-blue salt and pepper shakers—the last vestiges of her life in Haiti. This was all that remained of Mia’s childhood—before her mother’s illness, before life in the United States, and before learning how to navigate the unfamiliar culture and family she’d been thrust into fourteen years ago.
The Ellis family estate in Meridian, Indiana was a six hour ride away, but as foreign to her as another planet. Light years from the little cinderblock on Rue Janvier.
Mia traced the coiled tendrils on the tablecloth with the tip of her finger until it rested on the words that followed: L’union fait la force. Unity Makes Strength—the Haitian credo.
Unity. Ellis. Hospital. What should I do?
