Aria let his voice fade into the background. She was petting Palin when a sound near Ciarra’s purple van caught her attention. It was Aston indignantly digging holes in the dirt with his stick like he so often did, there being nothing else to preoccupy himself with. Aria’s stomach sank when she saw him. She was close enough to see that the brow on the left side of his face bore a cleaned-up cut. A bruise that covered half his face had swollen his left eye shut.

She knew that marks like that on a child so young could never have come from a school fight or an accidental fall. She knew that Aston had been beaten. She wondered if that was the reason Ciarra had ended up in the fight they had just walked in on.

Aria was consumed by fury that she could do nothing about. She watched Aston sit alone in the dirt, his mother having closed the door on him, drowning in her own self-pity. It reminded her of her own childhood. The many times she watched her own mother cry her eyes out over the very person who was ruining their lives. Her body went numb with the memory of it.

But she didn’t approach Aston because she knew the kind of mother that Ciarra was. She would abandon her son but consider any person who tried to take her place an enemy. And Aria couldn’t afford that. At least not right now. She was terrified of Ciarra. In fact, she hated her. But her safety depended upon Ciarra never knowing it.

Aria knew that the man who had stormed off in a rage was Aston’s father. A deadbeat who showed up like a hero to take his son somewhere only rarely, whenever his band was in town. He lived in Las Vegas. One of two electric guitarists in a heavy metal band that got few gigs, he had a day job doing assembly at a manufacturing plant. It was not enough to pay child support. Or, more to the point, he said it wasn’t, and Ciarra was so afraid of him stealing Aston as retribution for taking him to court that she never forced the issue. But on more than one occasion, today being one of those occasions, Aston’s failure to please him during one of their outings had resulted in a beating under the disguise of discipline.