The Prospect's Foster Girl

Bexley Odum has spent six years in eleven houses and never once been asked to stay. At twenty-two she cleans the Larkspur Social Club at night and sleeps in a supply closet on Sundays, because it's warm and no one has ever told her she can't. The man who finds her there is forty, a Copperhead prospect with fourteen months of unpaid labor behind him and a patch he wants more than he has ever wanted anything. He buys her breakfast. He waits a whole winter. He tells one lie about one night to one sheriff, and it gets him the patch, and it costs him four years. Bex finds out she's pregnant the week he goes to county, and she does the only sensible thing a foster kid knows how to do — she moves, enrolls, works, and raises a son in a small apartment in Kansas City without ever once writing his father's name on a form. When the conviction is thrown out, Rab walks out of prison with a lawyer's letter, an address and no plan except the one that begins on a park bench.