Six Months to Forever

ROSE'S POV "Get Up!” I stared at my reflection in the mirror and for a moment I couldn’t recognize the girl staring back. My eyes were swollen, my skin too pale and sickly like something worn thin and left in the weather. “Put yourself together,” I said to myself, and this time it wasn’t my own voice I heard. It was mama’s, worn smooth by years of hearing it, echoing somewhere in my eyes: When life pushes you down, sweetheart, don’t stay there. Pick yourself back up. She used to say it all the time, when I scraped my knees running too fast from the driveway, when I came home from school crying and feeling like I wasn’t good enough. Mama always made me feel like I was enough and that I was special. “You are made for great things,” she would say. I wished I was standing here right now, she could say that to me again, because I really need to hear it right now. But mama wasn’t there, and she hasn’t been here for the past three years — three years since that accident took mama and papa. Even though they were my adoptive parents, I still loved them and their death almost broke me, but what broke me far worse was finding out my adoptive brother had a congenital heart disease not long after their death and, for the first time, I understood what real fear felt like. The fear was still there, months later, when I found my biological parents. I remember the first time I saw them. My mother cried before I’d said a word, while my father stood silently beside her like he did not trust himself to speak. I thought, foolishly, that finding them would feel like coming home. It didn’t. All I could think about standing in their living room was that I couldn’t abandon my brother, he was all I had. So I begged. I begged until they finally agreed to let him stay, even if it meant I had to shoulder all his responsibilities and treatment on my own. At that very moment in the living room, I lost all hope I had for them when I first met them, and standing here right now proved me right, because being born into a wealthy family didn’t make me wealthy. As mine cared about their adoptive daughter more than me and I saw it the very first time I walked into this house. I blinked and wiped beneath my eyes and smoothed my hair. I needed to pass this interview. It wasn’t just an opportunity, it was the only way out I had left, and I intended to give it everything I had, because mama had always been right about one thing above all else: life could knock me down as many times as it wanted but getting back up was always going to be my choice. And this time, getting up wasn’t just about surviving another fall. It was about making sure I never fell this far again.