Instead, they dropped Heaven off with her friend’s parents, Angie and Scott Haney. Nor did the caseworkers file a petition in court to take the girls into foster care. Their mom had always said that if anything were to happen, the girls would live with their great-aunt Sonja, who had worked at a domestic-violence shelter, but no one from the department called her. “And the only thing they did was they took us away from each other.” “We thought that maybe they’d place us together or put us in a foster home,” Molly told me. Molly said that if they left her, she would try to kill herself again. The sisters told the caseworkers that they couldn’t handle their grandmother’s rage any longer. Recently, their dad, who had never been physical with them, pushed Molly facedown on a dirt path. The hospital where Molly was admitted alerted the child-protective unit of the county’s Department of Social Services, and days later, two caseworkers showed up at their grandmother’s house to investigate neglect. In January 2016, Heaven found Molly on the bathroom floor after downing 27 tabs of Zoloft in an attempt to take her life. She kept telling Molly and Heaven that it was their fault - if only they’d taken better care of their mom, she might be alive. Their grandmother, too, was trapped in an angry stage of mourning, looking for someone to blame for her daughter’s death. The girls moved in with their grandmother, up the road from their wood-paneled house in Cherokee County, N.C., a poor, sprawling region at the southwesternmost edge of the state. Although Molly had her own bedroom, she slept on the couch in Heaven’s. They shared the same group of friends, the same tanks and capri pants. Molly was deaf in her left ear, and her sister always asked others to speak loudly for her.

Their older brother, Isaiah, left their home in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains when their mom was still alive, and the teenage girls depended on each other. Once, he made Heaven watch him set their mom’s Chevy truck on fire. It seemed to the girls that he was on too much meth, and whenever he used, he got mean and crazy. His grief, as their mother lay dying, sent him spinning. Their dad had been in and out of their lives for most of their childhood. At 15, she and her sister, Heaven, who was a year younger, had no idea where they would go. When a staph infection killed Molly Cordell’s mother just before Halloween in 2015, Molly felt, almost immediately, as if she were being shoved out of her own life. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

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