Cody felt like he owed her an explanation, even if it was a short one. “He adopted me when I was in a little village outside of Botswana. He had a perpetual smile and was always around the hospital tent wanting to help me. He said that when he grew up, he was going to be a doctor.”

“How old was he?” Stevie asked.

“About nine or ten. His mama was dead, and his daddy thought he had been born ten summers before. Dineo was always underfoot”—Cody smiled at the memory—“kind of like those kittens over there.”

“Did you hate to tell him goodbye?” Stevie asked.

“Two weeks before I left the village of Bere, the guerrillas came in their trucks and…” Cody closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them slowly and went on. “They destroyed our hospital tent and fired their weapons into the air. They were gathering up all the children they could find and taking them away to train them to…”

“That’s for real?” Stevie asked. “I thought it was just stuff you see on television.”

“It’s very real,” Cody could still feel the ache he had felt in his heart that day. “Dineo’s daddy, Bodi, fought with them when they tried to take his son from him, and one of them shot him. The bullet went through Bodi and into Dineo, so he wasn’t any good to them anymore. They only wanted healthy kids. They would have kidnapped me if they realized I was a doctor. I grabbed the boy up and took him to a hiding place. I’d only been there a little less than six months, but Bodi and Dineo had become more than just friends. They were family. Then the noise, the gunfire, the yelling, the sound of the trucks moving away with crying children all stopped. I felt so helpless and heartsick when I realized they were both dead.”

He stopped and swallowed several times. “Silence as thick as a dense fog filled the village for a few minutes, and a new haunting sound filled the air as people began to weep over their stolen children. I tried to save Dineo, but he probably died instantly, and the doctors and nurses were taken out of the country the next day to be reassigned. Bodi was the only one who had resisted, but there were two deaths that day. He and Dineo both died, and I didn’t even get to attend their funerals.”

“I’m so sorry. You were still reeling from that death when you got the news of your father. Man, that had to be tough,” Stevie said.

“It was rough, and I didn’t want to tell you because you’ve got enough on your plate, dealing with your own grief.”