Kateri watches while Rick stays in the doorway and Maggie practically crawls through the gore of the kitchen toward the girl hiding in the open closet. She hears Maggie speaking slowly, quietly, like she’s luring an injured animal.

Birdie comes out with her eyes blank. Kateri is afraid of a potential fight, that she will protest being taken anywhere, will wail for her mother or thrash when touched, will need to be restrained or even sedated in the van. But she does just what Maggie asks her to do. She comes out and gets on a small stretcher that Rick brings forward, and she lies back, her little brown hand gripping Maggie’s wrist. Between Birdie’s fingers, Kateri notices a small blue tattoo on Maggie’s wrist, a crescent moon. Rick covers Birdie with heavy cotton blankets, tucking the sides in.

“I’ll meet you at Mercy,” Kateri says to Maggie. Her throat tightens and she’s afraid for a moment that she’ll spill. Girls are so tough, she thinks, watching this one, covered in blood, clinging to a moon tattoo on a woman she doesn’t know.

Behind the house, deputies have upturned rocks and carefully scattered leaf piles. Kateri sees the shape of some of them moving, far off in the trees, the shine of their lights, the flash of a camera. Hurt comes and stands beside her, watching the stretcher load into the van.

“She mentioned a him,” Kateri tells Hurt. “She said she was waiting for him.”

“Who?” Hurt says. “The son?”

“I don’t know,” Kateri says, but shakes her head as if she does. “She called him an angel,” she says. She looks past Hurt at the activity in the woods.

“Go,” he says. “I’ll let you know what we find here. You belong with her.”

She hesitates, because from someone else, it would feel patronizing, telling her to look after the child. But Kateri thinks he’s right.

Our Lady of Mercy Hospital is thirty miles away, in the next town over, Mount Snow. It’s just big enough to have a community college and a tiny women’s school, Creveling College, a Walmart, a Wendy’s, and a small Catholic hospital. When Kateri arrives, the girl is in triage in the ER and there’s nothing to do but wait. She can’t sit still on the plastic chairs in the waiting room, surrounded by sick or injured people waiting to be seen, so she walks.

She spends time in the art deco lobby, looking at the high windows and the inlaid quartz in the floors, the dark wood, the giant chandelier that hangs in the center. And then once she’s walked the perimeter, she ducks into a door that says CHAPEL.

It isn’t her thing. Even with her saint’s name and her Catholic grandmother, she doesn’t feel any truth to it. Her mother rejected the faith, and what Kateri knows at all was gleaned from her grandmother’s things, her little portraits of the Blessed Mother, the crèche she put out at Christmas, her Lives of the Saints. It all feels like a faraway myth. The room is dim and red and smells like candles and incense, like warm wood and spice. Kateri dips her finger into the holy water and crosses herself as she was taught.