“Late?” Nora asked. “Late for what?”

Melody glanced around like she was looking for a way to run, to get away from them before they made her break a promise Father Ike had surely told her she had to keep.

Then Nora said something to make the girl stay. “When I was fifteen, my best friend in the world was my priest. He helped me with my homework because I was terrible at math. And he gave me hot cocoa in winter. And he gave me a beautiful saint’s medal, Saint Louise. That’s my middle name. Eleanor Louise Schreiber.”

“They’re not supposed to,” Melody whispered.

“I know they’re not,” Nora whispered back. “But sometimes they do. And sometimes it’s kind of nice. I wore my saint’s medal all the time. But just because they break the rules sometimes, that’s not… It’s never your fault if they do that. And you’d never be in trouble for telling someone about it. Was Father Ike going to take you somewhere last Saturday?”

“Dad promised,” Melody said. “But we haven’t seen him in months. And Mama works all weekend. I never see her either. So Father Ike, he said he’d take me to the Butterfly Dome.”

Some prayers don’t get answered. Jesus Christ, it was a kid. Cyrus didn’t want to hear anymore. He wanted to cover his ears.

“The Butterfly Dome sounds fun,” Nora said, her bottom lip quivering.

“They say the butterflies will land right on you,” Melody went on. “And they have all kinds. Papilio nireus—that’s the blue-banded swallowtail. And Caligo memnon—the owl butterfly. It has big eyes on its wings. And Papilio palinurus—the emerald-banded peacock. It’s the prettiest butterfly in the world.”

“You had your butterfly backpack on Saturday?” Nora said. “You were going to be gone for the whole day?”

“Father Ike said I might want to swim. I should bring other clothes. It’s on an island. And Mom doesn’t get off work until ten,” she said. “We could spend all day at the Dome.”

“You like butterflies a lot, then?” Nora said. Cyrus couldn’t even stand to hear her voice, she was trying so hard not to fall apart. He wanted to scream, to weep, to howl, to pull Ike out of the ground and then put him back in it.

“Yeah, I love butterflies.”

“So do I,” Nora said. “I love them, too. Butterflies are beautiful.”

Cyrus walked away, down to the sidewalk, and quietly called Katherine. He asked her to come down, no lights, no sirens, and to bring a female detective from the special victims’ unit. One who was very good with children.

Chapter Forty-Two

Nora sat in the rocking chair in the finished nursery, one leg curled up to her chest, one leg on the floor, foot pushing to keep the rocker rocking. They would be home soon—Juliette and Céleste and Kingsley—to see the nursery for the first time.

Céleste would squeal, as she did when she saw anything pretty. Kingsley would nod approval though deep down, he would have preferred pink or yellow walls to the blue-green they’d settled on. Juliette would gasp in delight. Nora made sure the nursery was gasp-worthy. She would wander the room, hand on her swollen belly, and touch the ivory changing table, the ivory cradle and crib, the antique rocking chair Nora had scoured the city to find. Céleste had been a New York City baby and her nursery had been in Kingsley’s old Manhattan townhouse in a room with red wallpaper and gilt-framed mirrors. The mirror on the ceiling had been removed before Céleste’s birth, of course. They’d made it as pretty as they could, but the entire house had been an Adult-with-a-capital-A oasis and there was no more turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse than a dungeon into a daycare center.