Head down, do the work, then go home, thought Suki. It was her mantra. It got her through every day and right to the end of the week when sweaty Stefan put a brown envelope in her hand (and yeah, he tried for contact at that point, quite often, but she was fast on her feet and she always eluded him). Then she could catch the crowded bus back to the trailer park, get a wash down and change out of the hated lemon-yellow uniform, and fill Aunt Ginny in on her day.

Suki couldn’t recall a time when she hadn’t been dirt-poor, someone people looked down on. She couldn’t even remember her mom and dad because they had died in a car crash when she was barely three years old.

Aunt Ginny had told Suki that she had been sitting on her mother’s lap in the front seat, with her father driving, when an ancient Chevy swerved over the central reservation – its elderly driver had come from Jackson and fallen asleep at the wheel en route to visiting his daughter down in Beaumont on her birthday. The Chevy smashed into their car. The old man died instantly, and so did Suki’s parents.

By some miracle, Suki herself had been thrown clear of the wreckage, and was found by a young interstate policeman, bawling her head off at the side of the road among the pink-wrapped and bloodstained birthday presents. Not a scratch on her. Lucky? Well, maybe. According to Aunt Ginny, Dad was Dave Vance, a carpenter, scratching around for jobs half the time, and Mom Josephine had been a high-school teacher who had become a full-time mother to her baby daughter. Her one, her only child.

Aunt Ginny had been a teacher too, bright just like her younger sister, but poor health had ravaged her career and her looks so she remained nothing more than a spinster living in a downtown trailer park, having little to do with the world. And then the accident – heartbreaking, devastating – and along came Suki, who would have been put up for adoption and passed through children’s homes and taken for fostering, maybe adoption.

At that point, so her aunt told Suki – she had recounted this story to Suki so many times over the years that Suki felt she knew it by heart – Aunt Ginny had rallied herself, put on her best suit and scrubbed rouge on to her cheeks. She met with the social workers at the town hall and said no, there was no way her dead sister’s child was going to live anywhere but with her. She was the child’s godmother, after all. She was all the family the poor child had left.