Nell tensed, but Nico only smiled. “Yeah, man, you really look like her.” He turned to Mat. “So, are you on vacation or what?”

“Not exactly. Lucy, get lost.”

Normally she would have mouthed off, but now she didn’t dare. Instead, she snatched up Button and headed out the front door. Through the window, he watched her take a seat on the glider, where she’d be near enough to the door to eavesdrop.

He turned to study the kid who was the closest thing the girls had to a relative and began to dig in. “Here’s the way it is, Nico . . .”

Nealy eventually went outside to check on Lucy. The teenager had retrieved Squid from the motor home, and the dog lay next to her on the porch like a pile of smelly rags. Button was watching a robin hop on the ground while she gripped a spindle of the railing with one hand and sucked the other. Nealy refused to let herself think about lead poisoning from old paint. This time with Button had been good for her, she realized. She no longer felt quite so much like the Angel of Baby Death.

She sat on the top step across from Lucy and gazed out at the shady street. At one end, an elementary school with a small playground sat beneath the maples; at the other end, two boys dodged puddles with their bikes. Across the street, a man in a business suit was studying his lawn. Nealy heard the tinkle of an ice-cream truck and the sound of a mother calling a child inside. These everyday sights were as exotic to her as foreign lands were to most people.

Lucy toyed with one of Squid’s ears. “What do you think Mat’ll do to me?”

“I don’t know. He’s definitely upset. You shouldn’t have lied to him.”

“What else was I supposed to do? They’d have put us in foster homes!”

And that’s where they were still going. Not for a moment did Nealy believe Mat would leave the girls with Nico Glass, despite the fact that he’d been going to great lengths inside to point out that Nico was the girls’ only relative.

Of course, Nico wasn’t having any of it. When he’d announced he had a rock-climbing trip to Colorado planned, Mat told him to forget about it, but Nico kept throwing his things in a duffel bag.