“O king of the holy sanctuary / Bless us with your merciful gaze / O king of the holy sanctuary / So that our days of woe may turn for the better / O patron of the poor, what would the world say / If we return empty-handed from your door? / O king of the holy sanctuary.”

I grin at him. “The guy who sings it is way cuter than you.”

He gives me a teasing push.

Sanctuary. The real meaning: a place where these kind people have returned us to ourselves, to our own memories. Carlos softens against me. We can be kids again, remember who we were before we ran.

We lie on my bed, legs tangled, giggling, recalling old silly stories. I tell him about a party where I grabbed a chicken leg from another girl and she let out a wail so piercing, my mother took me home. He tells me about promenading with his cousin around his town’s square, pinching the arm of a girl his cousin liked, so he ruined the whole thing. “We were awful!” I say. We shake with full belly laughs. We kiss, longer. My head fits snug against his throat. He pulls his fingers through my hair. I touch his tattoo, tracing the intertwined fish. Maybe we too are the fish: circling round and round each other.

“I’ve got something to show you. Come.”

Sam is at our door. He leads us down the road until we arrive at a big barn, with a faded sign hanging from a post: GRETA’S BARN SCHOOL—NO VERY SERIOUS ADULTS ALLOWED, and next to that a wooden table. He unhooks the gate and leads us into the run-down building.

To my surprise, it’s a series of brightly painted rooms, some with chalkboards and cubbyholes and hooks. Sam explains that his mother ran a little school here; though he’s given most of the items to the synagogue—the chairs and blocks, the sitting cushions and crayons—he can’t bring himself to sell the property, not yet. Then he leads us down a narrow corridor to a set of rough wooden pens. Dried and dirty straw lies scattered on the floor.

“Stinky!” Kamal complains.

“This is where the pigs were. And back through that door was the chicken coop. Greta would have the kids gather the eggs and then she’d set them out on the table. People would come by, buy them, and simply tuck the money into a metal box. It was all an honor system.”

“Trust,” Carlos says.

Sam gives him a sharp look. “Exactly.” He grins at Kamal. “You want to see the real barn?”

Kamal jiggles with excitement. “Yes, yes!”

We step outside and then into a huge open space, dusty shafts of light streaming from a giant window. To the left is a platform, thick bales of hay stacked high, and a ladder leading to the loft, spread with more hay.