“She’s okay,” I said. “Your mom is with her. The nursery’s fine.”

“I just—” He looked around helplessly. “I feel bad.”

“It’s fine. It’s not your fault she’s sick.”

He stared at me, and in the dark, where our faces were shaded, I felt like I was seeing a totally different side of him. He seemed vulnerable. Almost scared.

Interesting, I thought. Not that it made me like him any more. But it was interesting.

He glanced away. “Okay, well . . . I guess I’ll go back to bed.”

I nodded.

Without saying good night, he ducked into his room and closed the door.

I waited off to the side of the nursery while Laura re-settled Agatha in her bed and spent the next several minutes fussing over her. Finally, when Agatha was tucked in and seemed to be asleep, Laura left—but she made me promise to come and get her if anything else happened.

I walked into my bedroom. I had shoved the tiny bag into my pajama pocket, and now I took it out and inspected it in the low light. The fabric was black, but very dusty. I loosened the drawstring and dumped the contents onto my bed. There were three items: a key—largeish with a pattern of leaves and an ornate letter C on it; a small plastic vial with clear liquid inside it; and a tiny origami-like triangle of folded money.

Why did Agatha want these things so badly? What did the key unlock? What was in the vial? It looked almost like a perfume sample, but I didn’t open it to sniff. And the money? If I thought I might be able to refold it, I would have unfolded it and looked. But I’d never been good at origami.

I crept back out to the nursery, which seemed artificially silent. I could hear the second hand of the old clock on the wall over the desk.

“Agatha,” I whispered. “Are you awake?”

Yes, she was awake; she turned toward me—her skin was rather gray, probably from the effort of regurgitating everything she’d eaten since lunch—and her eyes seemed to work to focus on my face.

“I’ll keep your stuff for you in my room,” I said. “Okay?”

She stared at me for another long moment, and then her eyes closed as if they didn’t have the strength to stay open any longer.

THE NEXT FEW days were tense. Worried about Agatha’s “illness,” Laura made her stay in bed and rest, which was frustrating and difficult for all of us. Agatha didn’t want to spend all her time in bed, which meant that she needed to be distracted and entertained. I spent hours reading to her from books she showed no interest in—books that, to be honest, I had no interest in, either. Laura had chosen them, and they were all bland stories with a dull educational bent.