I often saw him on cold mornings, pushing a soup cart down snowy streets, waking those who had passed out on the sidewalk, helping them get warm and get home. He ordered them about with the precision of a drill sergeant, an attitude that would have been irritating if it hadn’t saved lives. A few years prior, my father had often been one of those woken on Enoch’s morning rounds, and I had been deeply fond of this dull, middle-aged man and his rowdy sister ever since.

The business with the blue ink had started in late November, on what must have been our last tolerably warm day, when Enoch found me on my stoop pelting rocks at pigeons and watching night sweep over Washington Square. He was silent until I asked him to sit down, and then he pointed past the bare trees that filled the park to the clean, pale eastern sky.

“That blue,” he said. “You only get it at this hour, when the sun is sinking and the shadows are long and day is just clinging on. It’s my favorite color in the world.”

“It’s good enough.”

“I have dreams in that color. Dreams of hell. Not nightmares. I’ve had them my whole life. My father used to preach about the blue flames of hell, and I’ve decided I’d like to do a tract in his honor, with three-color printing, that shows damnation as only he could paint it.”

He slid a pile of meticulously printed religious blather, each eight pages long and printed in black, white, and a different shade of blue.

“And no matter how many different blues you try, none of them hits the mark?” I said.

“How did you know?”

“I know the look, that special brand of misery that comes from trying to make the real world line up with something perfect in your head.”

“And these are the cases, the tiny mysteries, that are your specialty?”

I was wary. This was the type of thing I would usually turn down. It was tiny, sure, but it was also impossible. Enoch had standards—you could tell just by looking at his perfect little tracts—and that was hell in a client. But that fall I needed work, in every way a woman can.

“I’ll turn the city upside down until you have the blue you want,” I said. “As long as you can tell me what’s so special about this shade.”

I chucked another rock, missing the bird badly, and he told me a story about a little boy who grew up in the heart of Lower Manhattan, long before a fence divided Eastside from West, the son of a gifted preacher who loved his children, but loved his ministry more.