to be mine, and it had a window that looked at a fence. And Itzel asked if Barrett knew, and Mom said not yet." Her voice wobbled and steadied. "But then we didn't go. And I don't know if we're still going. And I didn't want Bryony to be worse off because of me, so I gave her my markers, because she likes to draw the music notes, and I gave her my good socks with the cats, but she doesn't know those were from me, I put them in her laundry." She looked up at him in the dark, and her face was wet, and she had not made a sound. "Is that the worse thing? Grandma Win said you'd be happier. Are you going to be happier?"
He would think afterward about the things he might have said. There were a dozen of them, and some were better than what he did say, and none of them would have been as true.
"No," he said. "No, Ampi. I would not be happier."
She looked at him a long moment, checking, the way she checked the bottom of a swimming pool with her toe before she would let go of the wall. Then she nodded once and wiped her face with the sleeve of her fox pajamas, all the way across, ear to ear.
"Okay," she said.
"And you didn't make Bryony worse off. You hear me? Nothing about you makes anybody worse off. That's not a thing that's true." He did not trust his voice for the next part and said it anyway. "You don't have to give away your socks."
"I already did, though."
"Then we'll figure out the socks."
She considered this, and seemed to find it acceptable, and then she yawned enormously, the kind of yawn that takes over a whole child, and he opened his door and came around and lifted her down out of the cab. She was heavier than she had been the summer he married her mother. He carried her through the dark kitchen and up the stairs with her braids against his neck, and she was asleep, or nearly, by the time he laid her down on top of the lump of stuffed animals. He pulled the comforter over her. He stood in her doorway with his hand on the frame.
He had been in the house with this child for three years, and he had read her the monster hotel book and the one before it, and he had taught her to ride the bicycle hanging in the garage, holding the back of the seat and