Tom did not answer her. He couldn't. He sat in the plastic chair in the break room of the Eureka County Sheriff's substation and looked at a fifteen-year-old girl who had just told him, in about forty words, the thing nobody else in three years had been brave enough to say, and he felt it go into him like a nail into wood.
"Little brown thing," he said at last, his voice rough. "Sings loud for its size."
Wren almost smiled.
Jess Pike arrived at eleven fifty-three that night in a twelve-year-old Corolla with a cracked windshield and Utah plates. She came through the door of the substation at a dead run, still in her scrubs from a clinical shift she had walked out of halfway through, and Wren was off the couch and across the room before anybody could say anything, and the two of them hit each other in the middle of the floor and held on.
Tom stood by the vending machine and watched them, and then he looked away, because some things were not his to watch.
The caseworker from Elko, a tired kind woman named Mrs. Ostrander, interviewed Jess for an hour in Ruiz's office. She looked at Jess's driver's license, and her student ID, and her lease, and called her landlord, and called her clinical supervisor at the hospital in Salt Lake, who said that Jessica Pike was the most reliable student she had ever had and that if she had walked out of a shift, the world had better be on fire. At one-fifteen in the morning, Mrs. Ostrander signed a form placing Wren Pike in the temporary emergency custody of her sister, pending a hearing in Elko the following week.
"There'll be a lot of paperwork," Mrs. Ostrander told them. "Home study. Background checks. Your mother will have to be notified, and she gets a say. It isn't going to be quick. But I don't see any reason in the world why this girl shouldn't be with her sister."
Jess put her face in her hands and cried again.
Before they left, Wren came and stood in front of Tom by the vending machine. She was wearing a sweatshirt of Jess's that came down to her knees, and she looked about ten years old, and about forty.
"Thank you," she said.
"I didn't do anything," Tom said. "You did all of it. I just sat there and didn't drink my coffee."
"You stayed," Wren said. "You didn't just leave. You could've just left." She looked at him seriously. "Are you going to call her?"
Tom took out his wallet. He slid the photograph out from behind his driver's license, the one Carol's sister had sent last Christmas: a little boy with Molly's dark eyes and Carol's chin, sitting in a pile of wrapping paper, grinning at the camera with three teeth.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm going to call her."
"Promise?"
"I promise."