Alejandro stayed for another hour before leaving with the excuse that he had an early flight the next morning. It was back into the field, back out of his expensive suit and into his doctor’s scrubs. Back to tending those sick with easily treatable diseases that they had little access to the cure for, back to the endless cycle of rehydrating those with no access to water who would show up back in the hospital in a week or less, on verge of death from dehydration again.

Outside the gallery, Alejandro hailed a cab and climbed in. He turned on his wristscreen and began to doodle pictures as the car ran through the night. Faces. Makayla, Jaden, Jesse, José, Sebastian. A word. Hope.

Alejandro the man had and had not become what Ale the boy in raggedy clothes had wanted. He was not a great artist like that man who had carried him up the ladder outside the building that Makayla had blown to pieces. He forgave her, he really did. And he forgave himself. And he understood why the artist had never painted again. Beauty was beauty, hope was hope, but there was then, and had been ever since, so very much more to be done.

The car rolled through the darkness. Alejandro looked up and out the window as they moved away from the part of town that held wealth and excess into the part where fires burned in garbage cans and people huddled on the streets. He thought back to a painting in the gallery, the brightly colored fruits and the word “hope” hanging beneath them. He wondered if the people he saw now, warming their hands over the fire, would ever see it.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

First, I’d like to thank Joselin Linder, Mary Adkins, Nicole Solomon, Joanne Solomon, Christine Clarke, Sam Ritchie, Kate Tellers, Jessica Manion, and everyone else who read through the many drafts of this novel, helping it become what it is. I was blessed, while living in New York, with the most dedicated, professional, and generous writers’ group, and will always be in debt to them. Tuesday nights will never be the same without them.