Deathwatch by Dana Marton Page A

with that. He strode into his house and inhaled the mouthwatering scent of baking pizza.
    “ Everything okay?” she asked as she put on a pair of yellow oven mitts.  
    “ Couldn't be better.”  
    A pumpkin pie sat on the counter, defrosting. She must have pulled that from the freezer while he'd been gone. Odd how back when he’d left this house for Afghanistan, it hadn’t felt like home, but now it suddenly did.
    Maybe the deployment made him appreciate it.
    Or maybe the shift had to do with the beautiful disaster standing in the middle of his kitchen in yellow oven mitts, a voice in the back of his head suggested. Since he wasn’t comfortable with where that thought led, he shoved it aside and asked some questions instead.
    “ Is there any way Asael could track you here ? Do you keep in touch with anyone from your past?” He was almost certain someone had been inside the house earlier, had messed with his duffle bag.  
    She hesitated as she pulled the pizza from the oven, putting the stone on the top of the stove. “I friended my sister, Emma, a few weeks back on Facebook. I made an account pretending to be someone we both knew a million years ago.” She turned off the oven and closed the door.
    “ Who?”  
    “ One of the nicer social workers, Teresa. I was over ten years old, in and out of the system, by the time Emma was born. Nobody would take me, and I don’t blame them. But then Teresa said she'd only place us as a sibling pair, and people suddenly wanted me, because I came with a baby.”  
    She pulled off the mitts and put them back into the drawer. “We went to two other homes first. They wanted Emma, but wanted to give me back after a few weeks. Teresa insisted that we had to stay together. Then we finally went to the Bridges, and they didn’t just want the baby, they wanted me too.”
    Murph’s jaw tightened. His mother had been no picnic, but he couldn’t imagine a childhood like hers. “What happened to your birth parents?”
    “ I never knew my father. My mother had boyfriends,” she said darkly.  
    He suspected there was more to the story there, but he didn’t push. He understood the concept of someone not wanting to talk about their past. “So if someone was watching your sister’s social media accounts, they might have somehow figured out that you were connecting with her.”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know how they could do that. I was super careful. I’m not stupid.”
    No, she wasn’t. “What else? What’s the one thing you couldn’t give up?”
    She chewed her lip.
    Okay, so something was there. He waited.
    “ The life books.” She sighed. “I keep online photo books for foster kids. It’s just a web site. My name isn’t even on there. I don’t charge any money, so there’s no income, no paper trail. Asael couldn’t have figured it out.”  
    “ It never pays to underestimate the enemy. What do these life books do?”  
    “ Kids don’t remember their early years. In functional families, there are stories and picture albums. In dysfunctional families there’s nothing. So you can be a foster kid say eight years old, and most of your life you can’t remember and there’s no proof of it, no pictures, no stories.”  
    She pressed her lips together, as if trying to figure out how to best explain it. “It’s almost as if you didn’t exist. It’s kind of scary and unsettling when there are so many scary and unsettling things going on around you already. You no longer know a single person who’s been part of your early life who can tell you about it. You’re with a new set of foster parents, the third or the fourth or the tenth. No roots, no connections. Kids need an anchor to their own lives.”
    He’d never thought about that, but could see now how that might be, to not have anything solid to hang on to, to not have what everyone else took for granted: a past. “How do you give them a history?”
    “ Any foster parent can sign the child up,