Lily lifted her chin.
“I told him being poor doesn’t mean being bad.”
Silence settled.
“Grandma says some rich people are emptier than poor people. She says money can buy meat, but not an appetite worth having.”
Rosa snorted softly at the stove. “I said no such thing.”
“You said it about Mrs. Holloway and the dog she dresses like a baby.”
“That was different.”
Lily turned back to Dominic.
“He didn’t understand,” she said.
Dominic looked at her for a long moment and found himself thinking that children should not have to grow wise in self-defense.
That night, after Rosa tucked Lily into the bed they now shared in the next room, Dominic lay in the dark and listened to the bedtime prayer drifting through the thin walls.
“Dear God,” Lily whispered, “please help Grandma’s knees stop hurting and tell Mama I miss her. And please help Mr. Dominic sleep without bad dreams because I think he has a lot of them. I don’t know what he did, but I think maybe he wants to be better.”
Dominic’s chest tightened so sharply he thought for a second the stitches had torn.
He had not prayed in thirty years.
He had not been prayed for in longer.
His mother had done it once, maybe twice, when he was little and feverish in a one-bedroom apartment that smelled like damp plaster and soup. After she died, prayer became something other people did while he learned survival from men who laughed at heaven.
Now a seven-year-old girl, separated from him by one wall and a world of innocence, was speaking his name into the dark as if God might be persuaded to care.
He turned onto his side and stared at the window until the glass paled with dawn.
On the morning of day seven, Marco found him.
The knock at the back door was soft, professional, wrong.
