The children's shelter on Poly Drive was a converted elementary school, and it smelled the way all such places smell — floor cleaner, cafeteria milk, and the faint, brave odor of donated soap. Ava signed in at a desk behind security glass, and a staff member with tired, kind eyes checked her ID twice, because seventeen-year-old visitors come in two kinds and only one of them gets buzzed through.
"He's in the day room," the woman said. "He's been watching the door since nine. We told him eleven. He said, and I quote, 'Ava's never late, she counts everything,' which we thought was — well. Go on back, honey."
Danny was smaller than the space his absence took up. That was Ava's first thought, standing in the day room doorway: that the boy at the low table, bent over a puzzle with his tongue in the corner of his mouth, was small — eight years of small, in a shelter sweatshirt too big for him, with a healing bruise gone yellow-green along his forearm like a fading map of a country she would burn down if she could.
Then he looked up.
She had braced for running, as Katherine advised. What she got was worse and better: Danny froze. Entirely. The way she'd seen him freeze in the Pikes' kitchen doorway once, at a raised voice from the television. His hands went flat on the table. His eyes checked her face the way you check weather — for what was coming.
"Hey, D," Ava said, very quietly, and stayed exactly where she was, and let him come to her at the speed of trust. "It's just me. I got taller is all."
The freeze broke like ice on a river. He hit her at a run and she took the weight of him the way she'd taken the motorcycle — with her legs, all at once, deciding beforehand that it was already held — and Danny Wright, eight years old, who had slept in his shoes for a year, buried his face in his sister's stomach and made a sound that was not quite crying and held on with both arms and one leg like a boy drowning in reverse, climbing up into air.
They sat on the floor because the floor was where they had always done their best talking, in trailers and shelter corners and the back seat of a dead car, and Danny showed her the puzzle (a dinosaur, obviously), and the shoes — lined up by the day room couch where he'd been sitting, ready, paired, laces tucked — and told her the rules of the shelter, which he had memorized in a day, the way children in institutions memorize the weather systems of adults.
"Is it true what Miss Brennan said?" he asked finally, working a puzzle piece between his fingers. "That I don't have to go back to Mr. Pike's."
"It's true."
"Is it true I might could live with you?"
She had prepared for this question all night, in the notebook, in the dark, in wording after wording — don't promise what a judge owns, don't lie to him, don't make the court into the villain of his sleep — and in the event, sitting on a shelter floor with her brother's dinosaur puzzle between them, the prepared sentences all failed inspection and she went with the raw material.
"I'm trying to make it true," she said. "There's a judge, and paperwork, and a house check, and I have to finish some things. It might take a while. And while it takes a while, you stay here, and I come — Tuesdays and Fridays and whenever they'll let me — and nobody, nobody, grabs you here. If anybody ever grabs you anywhere, you tell Miss Brennan or you tell me, and it stops. That's not a promise about the judge, D. That one's mine. It stops."
Danny considered this with the gravity of a small supreme court. "Okay," he said. "And the shoes?"
"The shoes can go wherever you want them to go. In my house, when we have it, the shoes go by the door like everybody's. Because nobody has to run out of it. Not you. Not me."
"Okay," he said again, and then, with an eight-year-old's genius for the exact center of things: "Do you have a house now? Miss Brennan said you live with motorcycle men."
"I live over a garage," Ava said, "with a window and a lock, and the motorcycle men are downstairs, and one of them is teaching me engines and one of them makes soup like a grandma and one of them is a dog. It's a good house, D. It's the best house I've had since Mom. And if the judge says yes, it'll be yours too."
Danny placed the last dinosaur piece with ceremony. "Then I hope the judge counts everything," he said, "like you."
Behind the security glass, the tired, kind staff member was unashamedly wiping her eyes, and Katherine Brennan, arriving with a folder and her brisk walk, slowed at the doorway and looked at the two of them on the floor — the girl and the boy and the finished dinosaur — and wrote something in the folder, in pen, with the air of a woman entering evidence.