Chapter 1

I am my sister's keeper.

I didn't volunteer for the job. But I promised Mom I'd look after Sharon, so I do what I have to - to keep her safe. I do what's necessary.

I love her.

I can jog home from NSCC in half an hour. That's North Syracuse Community College. Not exactly Ivy League, I know. There's a shoe box in my closet full of letters from other schools, mostly from ones I hadn't even applied to. Northwestern, Columbia, Penn ... Most came with scholarship offers from their math departments. I'm kind of a freak at math.

But those schools would have taken me away from Sharon.

I scheduled my classes so I could be out by noon. I wanted to take mostly math and computer science classes. But to be out early, I wound up with a pretty weird mixture of classes that were available earlier in the day. Real estate, nursing...

I didn't really know what the hell kind of degree I'd wind up with someday. But that didn't really matter to me. Not the way my sister matters.

If I jogged the whole way home from NSCC, I could be waiting at the curb as the mailman drove up in front of our little house in his rotting Jeep with the steering wheel on the wrong side.

When I run like that in the summer the sweat drips off me. But this was winter. A deep inhalation of frigid air felt like a thousand tiny daggers flying into my lungs. A gasping exhaled breath would spout a huge cloud of steam into the air. I'd futilely flap my arms for warmth while eyeing the cancerous orange rust reaching inexorably up the Jeep's sides and into its guts.

The mailman probably didn't give a rip about the rust - the sooner the engine fell out, the sooner he'd get a newer rig with a newer heater. You need a good heater to survive driving around Syracuse in winter while the salt dumped on the roads relentlessly chews away at the metal around you.

He always ignored me standing there, putting the mail in the corroded old mailbox instead of just handing it to me. Sometimes he'd linger to light a cigarette with the Jeep blocking my access to the box, reveling in his power over me. As if delaying me a whole minute from retrieving a batch of bills was a big freaking hardship.

When he's had enough mental fantasy time he'd lurch the Jeep away and off down the street, spinning his tires to throw dirty snow at me. I guess you get your jollies wherever you can find them.

He never gave a damn why, starting a month ago, I'd begun to be there every day when he arrived. Or why my guts churned when I thought I might be late.

When I turned from the mailbox, I could usually see Sharon looking out the window at me, her jet-black hair framing her face; I'd give her a smile and a wave. When I opened the front door, she always greeted me with her beautiful but precarious smile, murmuring her thanks for my coming back to her.

Before I understood the danger, she would get the mail from the box every day and have it waiting on my desk when I got home.