“I’m sure she had a good reason. I’m sure she felt she had no other choice. You were safe with her.”

With someone else, she might have let it slide. But he belongs to her mother, and she doesn’t want Sadie to think she is forgiven.

“No. There’s no good reason. You don’t understand. I can never trust anyone because of her.” She knows she sounds overwrought.

Glenn’s listening though. “Maybe your mother needs to hear that from you.”

“She knows. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Her mother has stepped away, which seems like a mature, maybe even Christian, thing to do. Maybe Glenn has been a good influence. He’s a nice guy, funny. He holds doors, Hannah’s noticed, for men and women. He holds her mother’s hand. He’s so nice it makes her rethink her views on Sadie. Why would he like Sadie—love her—if there weren’t something redeeming about her?

“Tell her not to come. Convince her. I don’t care what reason you use. You can tell her I don’t want her to come.”

“You reached out to her.”

He’s angry on her mother’s behalf, she can tell. He rolls his eyes, like a twelve-year-old who doesn’t get his way, and reaches into his back pocket for his wallet. She’s about to protest—why on earth would he think it’s appropriate for him to give her money?

What he takes out is not a bill. It’s a faded wallet photo of a little girl with missing front teeth. And another photo, folded gracelessly because it’s too big for a wallet. A family portrait of a thirtyish woman who looks like the girl, with a handsome man and two towheaded boys.

“That’s Jill, my daughter.”

He puts the photo in Hannah’s hand. She refuses to hold it, and it lands on the sidewalk. She’s not that petty, she tells herself, and she picks it up, smooths it out, pretends dropping it was a mistake.

“Beautiful family,” she says.

Sadie returns, fingers on her cross. “Oh, it’s Jill,” she says.

Hannah feels a stab of jealousy.

She wants to be alone. She’s walked down to the canal before, and she likes how hidden it feels, like you’re going back to a time when no one you know was alive. But Glenn and her mom want her to walk to Key Bridge with them so they can set foot, “for a minute,” Glenn says, in Virginia. He was born there, moved to Ohio when he was a baby.

There’s a hotel at the end of the bridge. She can catch a taxi there.

They walk past the boutiques and restaurants of M Street, the Dean & DeLuca, a Middle Eastern restaurant, a burrito place.