“Those fuckers,” Condor repeats, solemnly, and touches my glass before drinking.

For a while we sit in silence, as the night passes through the room, and the occasional sweep of headlights on the main road cuts through his windows.

“My father’s dying,” I blurt out after a while. I didn’t even mean to say it. I didn’t come here to confess. Then again, I’m not sure why I came at all.

Condor’s hand tightens momentarily on his cup. “Fuck, Abby. I’m…” He trails off, and when he looks away I can see a muscle working in his jaw. “You’ve had some couple of days.”

I look down because looking at him only makes me want to cry, and wanting to cry makes me want to disappear. “I should be with my dad,” I say. “But I can’t. I couldn’t.”

Maybe I did come here to confess, because suddenly the urge to be understood is overwhelming. “I hated my father. I wished him dead all the time. I used to pray for it. He would send me to my room for hours to pray. Sometimes he’d lock me in a closet, because he knew I hated the dark, and he told me that sinners lived in darkness forever. And instead I would pray that he would drop dead of a heart attack or fall off a roof.”

“It’s not your fault, Abby,” Condor says.

“How do you know?” I take a sip to keep from choking. “Maybe there is a God. Maybe my prayers worked.”

“God doesn’t answer prayers like that. That isn’t what he hears,” Condor says quietly.

“What does he hear, then?”

He hesitates with his glass at his lips, watching me over the rim. “The little girl, alone, and frightened of the dark.”

He’s nice enough to look away, pretending he doesn’t notice that I’m on the verge of tears. He just sits there studying his glass, the walls and the ceiling, while I breathe through the urge to cry like the little girl I was then.

When I get it together I don’t risk looking at him. I focus instead on the square of rug between my feet. “Optimal’s been fattening the bottom line by dumping waste in the water supply,” I say. “Probably for years now. The tests came back and proved it.”

Condor stares at me. “They all said the water was safe.”

“They all lied.” I remember Kaycee and I once found a bees’ nest, abandoned, lying in the woods. She poked it with a stick until it caved in. Kaycee said the queen leaves her hive after laying her eggs and the children kill one another. This time nobody won. “It’s a nest. It’s all corrupt. Optimal, the local agencies, and some of the federal agents, too. They’re all in on it.”

“Money?” Condor asks.

“What else?” I say. But I can’t shake the thought of Lilian McMann, and her daughter posing naked in those ugly socks.

Those girls shouting in unison, Help, help, help. The word oozing from the corners of their pretty mouths.