a small, victorious smile curling at the corners of her mouth.
I was twenty-five years old, sitting inside the same Phoenix home where I had spent most of my childhood.
The cherry wood cabinet standing behind Gwendolyn had been personally chosen by my mother years earlier, and the faint scratch beside the doorway came from the afternoon I tried dragging my bicycle inside during a sudden desert thunderstorm.
Gwendolyn had lived in that house for nine years, yet she had an extraordinary talent for making me feel like an unwelcome
