Ivy didn't tell her mother anything.
She came home late that night, eyes still puffy from crying at the bus stop, and found Diane asleep on the couch with the television still playing low, a bowl of half-eaten cereal balanced on the arm of the chair. She looked older like this, Ivy thought, watching her mother's face soften in sleep, all the tiredness of a hard week smoothed away for a few quiet hours. Ivy pulled a blanket over her shoulders and turned off the TV, careful not to wake her, and went to bed without eating anything at all.
She lay awake a long time, staring at the ceiling, turning the name over and over in her mind. Monroe Textiles Acquisition. Two words in faded blue ink, filed away like nothing, sitting three feet from where she'd been sitting all night, close enough to to
