He stopped pacing and stood still, stood facing her. There was so much rage inside him he could all but feel it searing his pores. And the bitter rise of it stung his throat. ‘‘That was when she figured I’d better start earning my keep. She’d been in the life long enough to know where to go to find men who didn’t much care for women. Men who would pay for children.’’

She couldn’t speak, even when she pressed a hand to her throat as if to push words, any words, out. She could only stand there, her face bone-white in the light of the rising moon and her eyes huge and horrified.

‘‘The first time, you fight. You fight like your life depends on it, and part of you doesn’t believe it’s really going to happen. It just can’t happen. Doesn’t matter that you know what sex is because you’ve been around the ugly edge of it all your life. You don’t know what this is, can’t believe it’s possible. Until it’s happening. Until you can’t stop it from happening.’’

‘‘Oh, Ethan. Oh, God. Oh, God.’’ She began to weep, for him, for the little boy, for a world where such horrors could exist.

‘‘She made twenty dollars, gave me two. And made a whore of me.’’

‘‘No,’’ Grace said, helpless and sobbing. ‘‘No.’’

‘‘I burned the money, but that didn’t change anything. She gave me a couple of weeks, then she sold me again. You fight the second time, too. Harder even than the first, because now you know, and now you believe. And you keep fighting, every time, over and over through the same nightmare until you just give up. You take the money and you hide it because one day you’ll have enough. Then you’ll kill her and get out. God knows you want to kill her maybe even more than you want to get out.’’

She closed her eyes. ‘‘Did you?’’

He heard the raspiness in her voice, took it for disgust rather than the sick fury it was. A fury for him, underscored with a vicious hope that he had. Oh, that he had.

‘‘No. After a while it’s just your life. That’s all. Nothing more, nothing less. You just live it.’’

He turned away now to stare toward the house, where the lights glowed in the windows. Where music—Cam on guitar—carried by the breeze played a pretty tune.

‘‘I lived it until I was twelve and one of the men she’d sold me to went a little crazy. He knocked me around pretty hard, but that wasn’t so unusual. But he was flying on something and he went after her. They tore the place apart, made enough trouble that a couple neighbors who’d made it their business to mind their own got riled enough to beat on the door.