“Oh, shit,” one of them had said. “She’s homeless. Let’s go sit over there,” and they’d ambled away to a different tree. Juno, who had pretended to be asleep the whole time, had rolled over to watch them. There were three of them: two looked to be in their early thirties, and the third—who was on the outskirts of the friendship but had clearly latched on—was just a baby. He can’t be twenty-one, Juno thought. He laughed at everything they said but a little too loud and a little too hard. She’d heard them call him Villy, as in “Villy, you dumbass” when he didn’t know who Chris Farley was, and “Villy, you punk-ass bitch” when he admitted to listening to Justin Bieber. Juno felt bad for Villy. She’d rolled up her sleeping bag and left it in the crook of the tree, and then she followed them back to the Crouches’ house.

She’d wanted to get a better look at what they were doing; it was just regular old nosiness, she told herself. To the workers she looked like nothing more than an old lady taking a walk down one of the more prominent streets facing the park. Old ladies wore sweatshirts and sweatpants in the winter, they waved at babies in restaurants and stopped to tell the parents, “Soak up every moment. It goes too fast.” So when she started sitting on the wall watching them work, they’d thought nothing of it. She waved at them some days, and they waved back. She’d asked one of the workers once about the addition, and he’d said they were adding a multiroom structure to the side of the house.