The wetness from her wounds left pockmarks that clung to her T-shirt, as if it had been caught between tiny frothing jaws. An ancient urge rose within me to touch them, to tend to them. I had to clench my hands into fists.

“I’m not a prude,” I said. “You’re just really fucking gross.”

“Come on, Pey. You must’ve read my file by now. What was it the General always said at the end of an exercise?”

Even there in her dank little room, pajamas sticky with her own body’s sap and owing me information, Cal managed to make me feel like the chump.

“Maybe I’m trusting you,” I said, both of us knowing full well I would be finishing her file the minute I got home.

When Cal smiled, for the first time I could see how she braced herself, the effort it cost her to look so effortless. How much it hurt, clinging to the upper hand. She held out her raw arms like a carny opening the curtains, granting entry to her dusty roadside dime museum, her prized and paltry assortment of the odd and the ugly, the dangerous and the damned.

“Don’t drink the water,” she said.

LILY

“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” Lily asked, emerging from the kitchen when she heard Mickey.

“Down at the dock,” Mickey answered. “I’m just grabbing a magazine.”

“Where is your father?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice was smaller than usual, more like that of a child. Which, of course, she was. Lily met her in the hallway, and they stood together at the stairs, two dry bites in one tight throat.

The day Lily gave her testimony against Philip, she had been pregnant with Sean for six months. Her mother began knitting a baby blanket months earlier, all blue and green because her first child and her mother’s first child and her grandmother’s first child had all been boys. But even back then, Lily wanted a daughter.

She wanted a girl because she wanted to do better than her mother had done with her. Lily’s mother had done a great job with her brother. He was a successful lawyer in California with a gorgeous wife and fantastic self-confidence. But she couldn’t raise a daughter. Not, at least, as a full, individual person. She would’ve been excellent if she were training Soviet spies how to be American housewives. Lily, on the other hand, wanted Mickey to grow up to be whatever she wanted. So she signed her up for sports and science camps and encouraged her short-hair phase in the fourth grade with a little too much enthusiasm for it to last. She wanted for her fiercely, in a way she didn’t want for Sean. A way that was maybe a little too close to the malnourished want in her own heart.