“Can you blame him? Lost his mother a month ago. Now this.”

Lost. That was a strange word. Lost suggested something misplaced, something that might be recovered. He hadn’t lost his mother. After all, he’d been the one to find her. Lying in the tub. Floating in a white dress stained pink by the water, palms up as if in supplication, her forearms open from elbow to wrist. No, he hadn’t lost her.

She’d left him.

Left Eli alone, trapped in a house with Pastor John Cardale.

A female medic brought a hand to Eli’s shoulder, and he flinched, half from the surprise of contact, and half from the fact the latest welts were still fresh under his shirt. She said something. He wasn’t listening.

A few moments later, they wheeled out the body. The medic tried to block Eli’s view, but there was nothing to see, only a black body bag.

Death made clean. Neat. Sterile.

Eli closed his eyes and drew up the image of his father lying broken at the bottom of the stairs. A shallow red pool spreading around the pastor’s head, like a halo, only in the dim basement the blood had looked black. His eyes wet, his mouth hinging open and closed.

What had his father been going down there to do?

Eli would never know. He opened his eyes and began to absently thumb the pages of the book.

“How old are you?” asked the medic.

Eli swallowed. “Twelve.”

“Do you know your next of kin?”

He shook his head. There was an aunt somewhere. A cousin, maybe.

But Eli had never met them. His world had been here. His father’s church. Their congregation. There was a phone tree, he thought, a communication network used to spread the word when there was a celebration, a birth—or a death.

The woman slipped away from his side and spoke to two of the officers. Her voice was low, but Eli caught some of the words: “The boy has nothing.”

But again, she was wrong.

Eli didn’t have a mother, or a father, or a home, but he still had faith.

Not because of the scars on his back, or any of Pastor Cardale’s less physical sermons. No, Eli had faith because of how it felt when he pushed his father down the basement stairs. When the pastor’s head struck the basement floor at the bottom. When he finally stopped moving.

In that moment, Eli had felt peace. Like a small sliver of the world made right.

Something—someone—had guided Eli’s hand. Given him the courage to place his palm flat against his father’s back and push.

The pastor had fallen so fast, bounced like a ball down the old wooden steps before landing in a heap at the bottom.

Eli had followed slowly, taking each step with care as he drew his