He wasn’t a bad man. He could be mistaken for thinking it was a war, an ancient one, and that she would fight against the rest of them as long as she was near. In the autumn he took Rosa and Marco and Dolly to a new house, and Leonora was left behind. He arranged for her disability checks. He did not take her off the bank account.

“If you get help, we’ll come back,” he told her.

Poor Alan hired a nanny, Madeline, a jug-eared, freckled beauty. A good girl, as her father later described her to news cameras. She picked the children up at the end of every school day and brought them to the house. Rosa worshipped her; Dolly and Marco merely loved her. This went on for five months until the day after Madeline’s twenty-first birthday, when she woke up in the middle of the day still drunk from the first legal cocktails of her life, start of February, drove to the school, got the children into the car, and found the car was too hot, and as she tried to wrench her wool coat off one shoulder, and as she felt the last of the black Russians muscle through her veins, and as she hit a patch of black ice, she understood there would be an accident. She could see the children hurt in the back seat. The windshield gone lacey. Herself, opening the door, and running away, away, away. When the car stops, I’m going to leg it, and that was the last thought Madeline or any of them ever had.

No children, thought Leonora. She had intended to get herself upright and go looking for them. She should have eaten them when she could.

For a while she tried to distract herself with the radios. Each wore Poor Alan’s family name like a crest on the pellicle of the speaker. She went from room to room and turned them on, but then she thought she could hear—behind the sonorous daylong monologue of the news station, or the awful brightness of Vivaldi on the classical station, or jokes cracked by a disc jockey named after an ancient king—the voices of her children. She tried to tune them in. You had to use the volume and the tuning knob in mincing little oscillations. Then, there it was: the tootling rhythm of Dolly’s conversation. Rosa humming at the back of her throat as though ready to defiantly swallow the sound should someone walk into the room. Marco sighing before he explained something. She wondered whether they each had a station, Dolly, Marco, Rosa. Maybe they had different radios, even. No: they would be cuddled up together in one frequency, the way they liked.