The words were like ice water poured down Sherri’s spine. She froze for a moment. Then she carried the tray back to the kitchen, put the cheese and prosciutto in the refrigerator, the crackers in the pantry. She poured herself a shot of vodka to calm her shaking nerves. Then another, then another. She should do something. She couldn’t do anything. She should warn the girl. But she didn’t know who the girl was. She didn’t know what the girl had seen. She should, she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, she didn’t. Maybe she’d heard wrong. She’d been on the other side of a heavy door. It would have been easy to imagine hearing things that nobody had said.

After a time, she put it out of her mind. What other choice did she have, with no proof of anything? Even if she’d wanted to talk to anybody about what she thought she heard, she had nobody. Bobby and Katie were her family. They were her entire world.

And didn’t she love that world? Didn’t she love the glitz and the glamour of living with money? She didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that, and she had nowhere to go if she’d wanted to leave: no job, no resources. She had grown up without any money at all. They never had extra for school supplies or nice shampoo or even a gift to go to a birthday party, should she be invited, which she never was. Unless the whole class was invited, and that was always obvious and somehow even worse than not being included at all.

When Sherri was in fourth grade a girl in her class accused her of smelling like garbage because her mother worked in the kitchen of a restaurant and somebody had spotted her one afternoon taking the food scraps to the Dumpster in a big white bucket. The worst part was that the girl was right. Sherri’s mother did sometimes smell like garbage.