Part Un.

Marla had been here many times before. Never did she have an easy time saying goodbye, and found herself giving up too many of them her last few years.

Her simplicity of mind had finally been realized, and it was through the small memories and connections she shared with those that could never hurt her that kept her hair pinned delicately behind her ears, and her breakfast eaten. And although it had never occurred to her or her family before, living life internally would be the only way she could allow herself to make peace with the randomness of life, and the broken pathways her heart had squandered over the years.

She was more than 24 now, and of great achievement. Yet, she seemed less of an adult now than she was at 16, and only her tighter jeans and more matured make-up set her apart from her more boisterous sister.

As she sat folded into herself on the quilted, drooping couch, she stared at the pictures of strangers she had seen all her life, always in remembrances in frames on the wall, but never as living beings. As far as she could tell, they could have been a grand story her grandmother had crafted to keep her legacy going after raising 6 children, 5 of her own and 1 adopted in old age. To tell the truth, it would have been easier to accept if she knew they were not real, or at least that their names were not the same. But there she was, lingering in trance, wishing she had been deaf to that phone call days before.

It was an odd feeling, looking at smiling brothers, stacked together for the annual family photo. Three brothers taken into protective services, to be lucky enough to find a home and a family to erase them of their past and abandonment. Marla was born into the largest family she knew, but would never know them except through the torn and tattered boxes of pictures that reminded her Grandmother just how many lives she had touched, and how many she hoped would now be able to do the same.

Staring at the picture of the grinning, gap-toothed strangers, it was difficult not to fixate on the current loss, and wonder how others who actually knew him were affected. The idea of remembering now-adults from childhood photos, considering the recent suicide was hard to swallow, even for a distant half-foster aunt.

Who was he, and which one took that lonely path?

Dividing her sympathies among the three boys, she had not even known their names. But one of these boys was found suddenly alone, and then gone alltoosoon.

...