Yours to Keep Read Online Free PDF

accomplishments he was doing better than three-quarters of the men she knew. It sucked that the bar was so low, but there it was.
    On impulse, she reached out and tugged a handful of her sister’s thin, tight braids and was rewarded with a faint smile from Cara.
    Onscreen, the daughter of a prominent senator whirled with her partner. Ana wondered if the senator’s political party had pulled strings to get her on TV right before the midterm elections.
    Cara might not even know who the senator was. It was even faintly possible that shedidn’t know who was president. Ana’s sister and brother lived inside a bubble of their own making—their family, their neighborhood, their Dominican friends. Cara was twelve when she came to Hawthorne, old enough that assimilating had been much harder for her than it had been for Ana. Cara’s kids were citizens, but their mother had gotten lost somewhere between her two worlds.
    “Where’s Ricky?”
    Cara dragged herself to a sitting position, reached for the remote, and muted the TV. “Watching baseball at Ernie’s.” For the first time since Ana walked through the door, Cara looked at her full on. “You okay? You look a little …”
    Yeah, she felt a little whatever-it-was, too. Exhausted. Like she’d been turned inside out and scooped hollow. Part of it was the nature of her life—up by five, teaching by six, tutoring all afternoon, teaching again in the evening. Part of it was the terror and disgust she’d felt in Ed Branch’s office, which had taken five years off her life. But most of it was Ethan Hansen. She still felt buzzy and thrilled by the few moments she’d spent in his company. And two different parts of her brain warred with each other. Or maybe it was one part of her brain and the whole rest of her sex-deprived body. Twenty-seven-year-old women weren’t supposed to be celibate, were they? It wasn’t natural.
    “Spill it, sister.”
    “You look tired, too,” Ana said. Her sister worked only one paid job, but also mothering a preteen and two teenagers and caring for an extended household had made her prematurely middle-aged.
    “Don’t try to change the subject.”
    She wanted to tell Cara. Her secret, all her secrets, felt too big to contain. She tugged her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, rested her chin there.
    “Ana, my life is so boring. Tell me something interesting.”
    Whatever else you could say about this crazy day, it hadn’t been boring. She hesitated, tried to decide what she could and couldn’t tell her sister. She unfolded herself again to look at Cara. “Do you remember I told you the new guy at the high school is a creep?”
    “Yeah.” There was a gleam in Cara’s eye now. She loved gossip, loved the crazy in other people.
    “He guessed, or figured out, that I don’t have documents.”
    “Oh, shit!” Cara sat up straighter. The gleam in her eye had turned to panic.
    “Don’t worry, don’t worry. It’s not a big deal.” Damn. Ana regretted telling her. As terrifying as it was for Ana to imagine being sent back to D.R., it was a million times worse for Cara. Because of the kids. If Cara were ever deported, she’d have to choose between leaving her kids and asking them to leave behind everything that had ever mattered to them.
    “He’s not going to do anything about it,” Ana said, with more confidence than she felt. Though she was pretty sure it was true. Ed was a bully, which meant that he was probably a coward. Even if that wasn’t true, there was no point in freaking Cara out. “He was just trying to get in my pants.”
    “¡Cabron!”
    “But the story ends happily.”
    “You kneed him in the cojones ?”
    Ana laughed. “I would have. But I didn’t have to. It was better than that.”
    “What’s better than that?”
    “I yelled ‘Get your hands off me,’ and some dad overheard and opened the door and said”—she imitated Ethan’s low voice as best she could—“ ‘Is there a