“Fever,” she said. “I’ve asked them every twenty minutes to do something. They said if it hits one hundred and five, they’ll get the ice blanket.”

“I tried to help your father. I told him to get a lawyer.”

Erika was wearing a thin gold cross that caught sunlight through the sliver of a rectangular window on the other side of the hospital bed as she turned to Darren to speak. “My father didn’t do anything wrong. This is ridiculous. My father would never hurt Lester’s grandson. He loved that man.”

“Can I ask you something?” Darren said, feeling awkward on his feet, his height making him seem freakish and too removed from the human beings around him. He lowered himself near her stool, crouching on his sore legs. “Who is Monica Maldonado and why was she working for your father?”

“Who?”

“Does this have something to do with the sale of Hopetown?”

“There is no sale.”

“What do you mean?” Darren asked. “Your father said this whole thing was your idea.”

Behind him, he thought he heard a hmph cut through Margaret’s praying.

“I mean,” Erika said, “he hasn’t signed the papers. I found the whole lot of them sitting on top of him and Mama’s chest of drawers. I don’t know what’s going on, but he’s waffling, or he’s changed his mind…” Her voice faded as she turned back to look at her father in the bed. Leroy’s eyelids fluttered at the same time that the spasms in his body found a softer rhythm. “Oh, Daddy,” she said.

She took a towel from the bedside table, dipped it into a plastic cup of water, then used it to gently moisten her father’s dry mouth. “Either way, he’s not staying here after this. I don’t care what happens out there. I’m not risking his life on some place that hasn’t been a real town, a real community, in fifty, sixty years. Hopetown is a memory, an idea that’s long past its time.”

Now there was a cluck of the tongue from Margaret, who was clearly listening to every word. Erika, who’d had enough, stood and turned to face the elderly woman, pointing a finger in her direction. “He would have been gone years ago if it weren’t for you. As soon as Lester’s awful family moved in and took over, he would have left Hopetown if he weren’t trying to protect you.”

Margaret opened her eyes. “Your father is an honorable man.”

“My father is an old fool who lost control of our ancestors’ land.”

“Your ancestors?” Margaret said, a curl of amusement in her eyes. “You understand so little of your own history, my girl. Between my ancestors and yours, the debt of gratitude goes both ways. Your father understands that.”