Ink, Love, & Lies

Chapter 1

When I was a girl, I thought a couple walked down the center aisle of a big steepled church while a crowd watched, and when they got to the end, they said their due’s, kissed, and then the preacher stood back as a stork flew in with a baby bundled up around his beak. The stork landed the child in the bride’s arms, and that’s where babies came from. All in a neat package. In my view, that was how children came into the world and blessed to their parents.

But that’s not how I arrived. I arrived every few years in an old emerald Lincoln Town Car.

At the age of five, I was sitting in the back center seat with the air conditioning on full blast, wearing a blue chambray dress that I kept smoothing down my thighs to keep myself from scratching at the incredibly itchy white lace-trimmed socks around my ankles. We pulled up in front of a house, and my first thought was to look around for any climbable trees—escape routes.

“You didn’t sweat through your dress, did you?” the social work…