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“I promise.” I try to sound strong, but sleep is coming fast, and Mama’s voice is fading.

“Stand and fight, and don’t ever let anyone see your fear. This is how we survive, malysh. And I will be back soon. I will be back as soon as I can.”

My mother never did come back.

But six months later, Yakov did.

I didn’t run, just as I promised her. I didn’t hide. But in the years that followed, I often wished I had.

I glance across the car, but Luke still has his hat over his eyes, sleeping. The stars above are high and wild over distant mountains, and we haven’t passed another set of headlights in more than two hundred kilometers.

The orphanage where Mama left me was a brief moment of reprieve. A short period where, for once, I slept in the same bed every night and ate every day. The nuns didn’t hit me, and the other kids were just as quiet as I was.

When Yakov came for me, he was dressed in a nice suit, spoke English like an American, and gave the nuns so much money that their eyes shone.

I’d learned enough English by then to understand what he told them: that my mother had taken me away from him and then abandoned me.

I wanted to tell them it was a lie, that he wasn’t my father, but I knew it was dangerous to tell anyone our secrets.

And besides, Yakov promised me he would take me to Mama.

He didn’t, of course.

Yakov never told me what happened to her.

I’m not sure when I gave up hoping she would come back.

All I remember is that at some point I knew, somewhere deep and painful inside, that she was dead.

I could feel it in my bones. And I could see it in Yakov’s face, in the way he sometimes stared at me, like he knew a secret I didn’t.

By then, he had me locked in another room. And not just me. There were many others in the building where he kept me, boys and girls alike. I never met most of them.

But at night, I often heard their screams.

I was fortunate. Yakov didn’t sell me, like he did many of the others. Instead he used me to make deliveries for him, packages that I didn’t realize were drugs until the day the police caught me with one of them. It wasn’t like I had a phone number for Yakov, and I wouldn’t have called if I had.

Yakov saw me briefly on the day of my trial, when I went to the bathroom at the courthouse. All he said was that juvie would be good for me.

Then he left.

I stayed silent throughout my arrest and the brief trial. I knew there was no point trying to fight whatever was coming. And besides, by then I knew there were far more dangerous places than whatever was waiting in the juvenile detention facility the judge sentenced me to.

In some ways I was right. Juvie wasn’t all bad. I got fed, and I learned to read and write properly. Being locked up was hardly new for me, nor was being beaten up.

But in other ways, I’d landed in a new kind of hell.

In late ’90s Miami, nobody wanted to talk about child abuse, especially when it came to boys. Which meant that for a certain type of guard, working in male juvenile detention was like an addict being given a key to the drugstore.

Their sadism and abuse created a pack of desperate, angry boys, who in turn became capable of far worse things than just beating those younger than them. I was their favorite target.

I stood, just as my mother taught me. And I fought.

I learned to fight fast, and I learned to fight dirty .

Even when the older boys held me down so the guards could do things that made me sick inside, I fought back.

Because by then, my mother’s words didn’t belong to her anymore. They belonged to me.

Stand and fight was my mantra. Survival was my only creed.

And because I somehow knew that Yakov had a hand in my abuse, I was determined to survive it.

Every time one of the guards came for me, I smiled right at them.

I smiled no matter what they did to me. I took the beatings, and the abuse, and I made up my mind that no matter what happened after juvie, I wasn’t going back to another locked room and whatever fresh hell Yakov had planned for me.

I didn’t see him again until two years later, when I was in the halfway house they put boys like me after we were released from detention. Boys who had nowhere else to go. Boys just as damaged and sadistic as any I’d found inside juvie.

I knew it was time to go. All I needed was an opportunity.

That opportunity came in the form of Roman Stevanovsky. And it came on the same day I saw Yakov lurking across the street from the halfway house, watching and waiting.

It was Roman who got between me and the older boys Yakov had paid to bring me back.

Following Roman out the door and onto the street was the first and only time in my life that I ever ran. Not because I was afraid. And not because I was running from Yakov.

I ran because Roman was a future that I could run toward.

He didn’t show fear. He knew how to survive.

And somehow, I knew he was just as lonely as me.

Roman became the home I held in my heart. Until I met Abby, he was the only home I knew.

And then Abby left.

I shift uneasily behind the wheel, reluctant to even go back to that sickening moment.

The memory comes anyway, in gut-wrenchingly vivid detail. Suddenly I’m back in that Madrid apartment, staring at the empty bed, the envelope from Abby on the bedside table. I’d known what the letter inside it would say before I even opened the envelope.

In fact, it was days before I could brace myself to open that fucking thing.

I pick up a bottle of water and pour it over my face as I drive, then gulp the rest, more to calm my racing heart and the sick feeling in my stomach than because I’m either hot or thirsty. All I can hear is my mother’s voice: I will be back as soon as I can...

Abby might not have said those words, but they were the only ones I heard when I read her letter. It said that she’d be in touch after three months. But as far as my fucked-up subconscious was concerned, Abby was simply gone.

And she was never— ever —coming back.

Because while stand and fight might be the mantra I use for war, when it comes to love, I don’t have a creed to follow.

That’s why I didn’t fight for you, Abby. Because I never fucking learned how to.

Hardship and pain—yeah, those I learned. All too fucking well.

This is how we survive, malysh . . .

I know my mother tried to prepare me for whatever she imagined I might have to face.

I’m old enough to understand that she meant her words to sustain me, to show me the way when there was no way.

And hard as her words might sound to some, I’m old enough to know they were also the only thing that kept me alive after she left.

But I’m not a lost kid anymore.

And Abby isn’t my mother.

I will find her.

And maybe, when I do, it won’t change how she feels. Maybe I will find her, only to fucking lose her again .

But by Christ, this time I will stand and fight. Harder than I have for anything in my life before.

Because this time, I’m not fighting because I’m a good fucking soldier .

I’m fighting for my life. For my heart.

And for the only home I’ve ever truly loved.