All the Little Pieces. Jilliane Hoffman

it. She set Charity up to work at Sweet Sisters when the kids were in school, and found a low-cost daycare down the street from the bakery for the little one.

      And she footed the bill for it all, on the understanding that Charity would be responsible for at least a portion of her monthly bills until she got on her feet, however long that took. All she had left to do was physically get her sister down to South Florida before Nick came back around. The day after wiring the bail money, she drove to Sebring, rented a small U-Haul and in a single morning she and Kamilla packed up the kitchen, the kids’ stuff, and Charity’s closet, loaded everything in the U-Haul, and headed back down to Coral Springs, with Charity following right behind her. She took the Turnpike up and back, avoiding 441 and the rural back roads. With any luck, she would never have to drive on them ever again.

      Faith was a month shy of her nineteenth birthday when she’d left home for college. She had never returned. Oh, she’d gone back for Thanksgiving and Christmas and summer breaks, but she never boomeranged back to the nest after graduation, like most of her friends had. But when she’d walked out the door of her childhood home in Miami Shores that sweltering August morning in 2001, she had no idea that she wouldn’t be back. She probably wouldn’t have left if she had, because the thought of leaving her home and her family forever would have been too overwhelming; even though she was aching for independence at that age, she was still a homebody. On that day Charity was sitting at the breakfast bar in sweatpants and a Nirvana T-shirt eating a bowl of Captain Crunch, watching Faith load the car. Their mom couldn’t get off work, so Vivian’s parents were taking them both up to UF. Once the last bag had been thrown in the trunk and she’d reclaimed her favorite jeans from the back of Charity’s closet, she’d returned to the kitchen, patted her sister down for anything else of hers that she might’ve tried to ‘borrow’, kissed her goodbye, and … that was it. There was no fanfare. No mopey tears or drawn-out clutching, lamenting when the two of them would be together again. She’d just driven off, hand waving out the window, watching in the side-view mirror as her house and her mother and her sister got smaller, never understanding at the time how nothing would ever be the same. Because she had no idea she wouldn’t be back. She was looking forward to the future, not missing the past as it waved goodbye to her.