There was a spell, just after Souad died, when Rat used to awaken in the night to find the kitchen ablaze with light, and go out to find Morgan sitting in his usual chair at the kitchen table, just as if it were breakfast time.

“What do you want, Morgan? It’s the middle of the night. You hungry?” She’s never asked him anything this nice in years.

He doesn’t answer.

“Go back to bed.”

When he doesn’t budge, she finally goes and gets him a handful of cookies, a mug of water.

“Eat and go back to bed.”

It was Rat who figured out he was scared of the dark, and got Jean-Luc to rewire the little moon-and-star lamp they’d found in the dump and fix it up with a twenty-watt bulb.

Not that she liked Morgan. More that she had a sense of order that was rudimentary but still more intact than her mother’s, at this particular moment. For it was as if Vanessa, having gone through the trials required to adopt Morgan, was now sunk in her own private mourning for her friend, a state that rendered her uncharacteristically slow and myopic. If Rat noticed that Morgan had been wearing the same socks for a week or that his toes were gray with dirt, it got to her.

“Vanessa, the kid’s dirty.”

But niggling little things like hygiene weren’t registering with her mother, so eventually Rat would have to give him a shower herself. And because Morgan, it turned out, had his own sense of order, and besides, didn’t like anybody seeing him naked, soon all she had to do was dispatch him to the bathroom and he’d emerge if not clean, at least wet. This made her feel they were basically on the same side.

Over time, Rat began to notice things about Morgan. Things that singled him out from other people’s younger siblings—not that he was her kin.

She caught herself bragging about his bravery. At school they’d be talking about snakes and Rat would tell about the time Solenne and her cousin found a giant grass snake (big as your waist) in the water barrel, and how Morgan had fetched a garden hoe and hacked the snake in two without saying a word. And Rat, who had heard this story from Solenne, had been way too impressed to tell Morgan what she begins to teach him later, that there’s no need to kill an animal that’s harmless, that if you go around killing everything that scares you, the world becomes a prison.