He nodded. “It’s what keeps them coming back year after year. It’s why we have such a robust presence at mile five.” The way he smiled at her made Alexa’s stomach do that flippy-floppy thing, and she tried to concentrate on that, instead of the place on her arm where Tyler’s spit had landed.

58.

Sherri

Sherri took a sponge to the stovetop in the kitchen on Olive Street. In her old life she’d hardly ever touched a sponge—the cleaning ladies did all of the dirty work. But she’d grown up as a regular kid with regular chores: she knew how to clean. This stove, though, was almost too much: the marks around the burners had probably been made by years and years of renters, of spilled pasta water and stove-top popcorn.

Sherri took a break and leaned against the counter for a moment, and that’s when she heard Katie’s quick feet down the stairs, rounding the corner into the kitchen. She was holding her phone, and her eyes were shiny with excitement.

“There’s fireworks,” she said. “Tonight, for Yankee Homecoming, at the waterfront. Can I go, Mom? With Morgan and the other girls? Can I please go?”

Sherri remembered the awful night on the pontoon, the pop pop pop of the fireworks she couldn’t see, the panic rising in her chest. “Oh, Katie. By yourselves? Or with a grown-up?”

“By ourselves. All the girls are going, it’s totally safe, please, Mom, please please please. Please.”

“No,” said Sherri. “Absolutely not.” The risks were too great. The dark, the crowds, little girls alone. Anybody could grab Katie. Anybody. “I’m sorry, honey. You know I can’t let you do that. You know we have some rules that the other kids don’t have. I don’t want you wandering around downtown in the dark. It’s not safe.”

There was a split second of silence, and then Katie’s face took on a new, hard, mean expression, and she said, “Daddy would let me go. And it’s your fault that he’s not here to let me.”

This was the first time in all this time Katie had said that. It was almost like she’d been saving it up, the single arrow in her quiver, and now she’d released it. Sherri took a deep breath and let the pain from the shot settle. She wanted to say, Daddy is the reason you can’t go. She wanted to say, Daddy is the reason we live here, and my hair looks like this, and I’m working as a receptionist. But she couldn’t say any of that, because that wasn’t her job. And however great her own pain was, Madison Miller’s family’s pain was greater, like a screw pushed through a fingernail, again and again, for the rest of their lives.