I looked over at the boy. He had a bowl of peaches in front of him. He picked up the slices one by one with his fork and took little bites off of them like a bird until they were gone. He almost looked like he had a smile on his face, too. It was the first time I had seen him look that way since we found him. I stood up and found a box of matches up in the breakfront with the dishes. I lit the candle on the table and brought it in front of him.

“Blow it out and make a wish,” I said. He looked up at me with his huge black eyes. I puffed up my cheeks and pretended to blow. A real smile stretched across his face now, and he blew out the candle and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Alejandro,” he said. He pointed to himself. “Ale.”

“Your name’s Ale?” I asked. It was the first time he had spoken since we’d found him.

He nodded and went back to picking at his peaches as if the best thing I’d seen in days hadn’t just happened.

We ate and ate. We ate until our stomachs were full and their emptiness back at the emergency shelter was a memory. Someone said something mildly funny and we began to laugh and laugh, big belly laughs. The boy was silent at first, but as we laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop, he began to laugh, too.

For the first time in a long, long time, it felt like we might pull through.

2 When we finally got to bed that night, everyone insisted that I take the parents’ room. My grandmother took the girl’s room, and Ale was in the boy’s room. Jaden said he would take the couch.

“Let’s face it,” he said. “It’s nicer than any bedroom I’ve ever had.”

That night, in the huge bed, I wanted to rest. I stretched out on my back, curled up in a ball, laid on my stomach with my arms and legs spread out at angles from my body. None of it worked. I couldn’t make my mind stop. All that I’d seen in the emergency shelter, what had happened in the boat. Every time I fell asleep for a minute, I woke back up right away, my mind feeling stretched out and dry. After hours of it, I tiptoed back over to the door, my wool socks not making a sound in the deep piles of the tan carpet. I crept out to where Jaden was sleeping in the living room and put my hand on his shoulder.

He jumped awake and I felt terrible. Then he saw, in the dark, who I was, where we were, that everything was upswing. He smiled.

“Makayla,” he said. “What’s going on?”