Pittacus? Pittacus? The man is watching me again, and though I can’t see the bottom half of his face, his eyes suggest a knowing grin on his lips. All at once I feel as though I’ve been struck by a train. Could this be my first Mogadorian?

I jump up, smacking my knee against the bottom of the table and nearly knocking over Héctor’s wine bottle. My chair falls backwards, crashing to the ground. Everybody in the café turns.

“I gotta go, Héctor,” I say. “I gotta go.”

I stumble through the doorway and make a mad dash for home, running faster than a speeding car, not caring if anyone sees. I’m back at Santa Teresa in seconds. I crash through the double doors and quickly slam them shut. I put my back against them and close my eyes. I try to slow my breathing, the twitching in my arms and legs, my quivering bottom lip. Sweat runs down the side of my face.

I open my eyes. Adelina stands in front of me, and I fall headlong into her arms, not caring about the tension from an hour before. She tentatively hugs me back, probably confused by my sudden display of affection, which I haven’t shown her in years. She pulls away and I open my mouth to tell her what I’ve just seen, but she brings a finger to her lips the same way I did to Ella at Mass. Then she turns and walks away.

That night, after dinner and before prayers, I stand at the bedroom window gazing out as darkness falls, scanning the landscape for anything suspicious.

“Marina? What are you doing?”

I turn around. Ella stands behind me; I hadn’t heard her approach. She moves through these halls like a shadow.

“There you are,” I say, relieved. “Are you okay?”

She nods, but her big brown eyes tell me otherwise. “What are you doing?” she repeats.

“Just looking outside, that’s all.”

“What for? You’re always looking out the windows at bedtime.”

She’s right; every night since she arrived, since I saw the man watching me in the nave window, I’ve been looking outside at bedtime for any signs of him. I’m now certain he’s the same man I saw in the café today.

“I’m looking for bad men, Ella. There are bad men out there sometimes.”

“Really? What do they look like?”

“It’s hard to say,” I reply. “I think they’re very tall, and they’re usually very dark and mean looking. And some might even be muscular, like this,” I add, doing my best bodybuilder pose.

Ella giggles, going to the window. She stands on her tippy toes and pulls herself up to see out.

It’s been several hours since I was in the café, and I’ve managed to calm down a bit.