After living for years in foster care yourself, you decided you were going to get a foster child

Carley wasn’t the ideal kid. Snarky, closed off, sometimes rude, but you understood it was a mask. She hated how you stared at her, how you talked to her so sweetly, how you treated her with so much kindness

she had been beaten and abandoned, chased out of casinos by managers and grabbed on the streets by creeps, but nobody scared her more than you

she was sitting on the kitchen counter right now, watching you do the dishes, wanting to ask a million questions and say a million things, but staying quiet