It was a doll.
It had yarn hair, one loose button eye, and a faded pink dress patched at the hem.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Marisol,” Lily said, as if that explained everything.
He stared at the doll.
“She watches people,” Lily added. “So you don’t feel alone.”
“I’m not alone.”
Lily glanced toward the kitchen where Rosa was stirring beans on the stove, then back at him.
“Then good. Marisol can have the afternoon off.”
He almost smiled.
By the fourth day, he had learned Lily’s schedule, her moods, the questions she held until homework was done and dinner eaten and Rosa was washing plates at the sink. He learned that she hated peas, loved library books with dragons, and worried over her grandmother’s knees the way other children worried over monsters under the bed.
He learned, too, that she had no instinct for polite avoidance.
“Did you ever have kids?” she asked one afternoon while sharpening colored pencils to exact points.
“No.”
“Were you married?”
“No.”
“Did anyone ever love you?”
The pencil in his hand stilled.
“Lily,” Rosa called from the other room, scandalized. “Mind your manners.”
Dominic kept his eyes on the wall a long moment, then said quietly, “Not in a way that lasted.”
Lily accepted that answer with the grave nod of someone filing information.
A day later, he asked the question that should have frightened her and somehow didn’t.
“What did you tell people at school about me?”
She looked up from her math workbook. “Nothing.”
