"Nora." His own voice came out hoarse and strange. "Nora, what is this? Who is she? Where are her parents?"
"I'll tell you. I'll tell you everything. Just please, please don't call the police. Not yet. She's scared of them. They took her before, and they put her in a place where a man hit her, and she said if anybody finds her they'll take her back there. I promised I wouldn't tell. I promised." Nora was crying harder now. "But I didn't know what to do anymore. It's so cold. It's getting so cold, Dad, and she coughs at night, and I can't bring enough blankets. I kept thinking I should tell you. Every night I kept thinking it. And I told her about you. I told her you were good. I told her you'd know what to do."
The child in Sam's arms lifted her head and looked at him. Up close, he could see that her lips were chapped and cracked, and there were dark circles under her eyes, and a fading yellow bruise along her jaw, the kind of bruise that comes from a hand.
"Are you going to take me away?" June asked. She asked it very calmly, the way you might ask whether it was going to rain. It was the calmness that frightened him most.
Sam opened his mouth. He did not know what he was going to say. He thought about the cold, nineteen degrees and falling, and the cough, and the bruise on her jaw. He thought about the word Daddy, and how she had said it, as if she had been waiting her whole life to say it to someone.
"I'm going to keep you safe," he said. "That's the first thing. That's the only thing right now. Okay? I'm going to keep you warm and safe. And then we'll figure out the rest together. I promise."
June looked at him for a long moment with her enormous gray eyes. Then she nodded, once, very seriously, and put her head back down on his shoulder, as if that settled it.
They sat together on the crib mattress under the lantern, the three of them, with the moon blanket wrapped around June and June wrapped in Sam's arms, and Nora told him.
She told it badly, out of order, the way children tell the most important things, circling back and starting over. But Sam had spent two years learning to listen to his daughter's silences, and he found he could follow it.
She had found June on a Saturday afternoon at the beginning of November. She had come down to Water Street alone, which she was not supposed to do, because it was where her mother used to bring her when she was little to throw bread to the ducks that wintered along the river wall. There were no ducks now. Nora came anyway, sometimes, when the house felt too quiet. She sat on the river wall and talked to her mother in her head. She had never told Sam that either.