Evan was eating cereal out of the box when Clara came into the kitchen the next morning.

"You came home in an Escalade," he said.

"Good morning to you, too."

"Mrs. Alvarez saw it from her window. She told Mr. Pham. Mr. Pham told me in the hallway." Evan was seventeen, six feet tall, and still all elbows. "Are you in a cartel now?"

"I'm a waitress."

"Waitresses don't get driven home by a guy the size of a vending machine."

Clara poured coffee into a chipped mug. "There was a little boy at the restaurant. He was having a panic attack. I helped."

Evan stopped chewing.

He didn't ask what kind of panic attack. He didn't need to. Clara saw the memory cross his face—the bathroom floor, the paper bag, her voice counting to four over and over.

"Is he okay?" he asked.

"I think so. For now."

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

MARCO BELLINI.

Clara closed her eyes. "Here it comes."

She answered. "Hi, Marco."

"Mr. Moretti would like to see you." His voice was strained. "Today. Eleven o'clock. A car will pick you up."

"See me about what?"

"He didn't tell me, and I didn't ask." A pause. "Clara. Whatever he says, think before you answer."

The line went dead.

---

The car took her to Dyker Heights.

Clara had been there once, years ago, to see the Christmas lights with Evan. Every house had been dressed like a department-store window—giant nutcrackers, glowing reindeer, music piped onto the sidewalk.

In October, without the lights, the neighborhood looked like what it was: money behind iron gates.

The Moretti house sat at the end of a quiet street. It was red brick and white stone, three stories tall, with a curved driveway and two men standing near the front steps who weren't doing anything except watching.

Dante met her at the door.

"How's your thumb?" she asked.

He held it up. It was bandaged. "I've had worse. Never from somebody that short, though."

He led her through a foyer with a marble staircase and into a study lined with dark wood. Rico stood by the window in shirtsleeves. Without the suit jacket, he looked younger, and somehow more tired.

"Sit down, Miss Bennett."

She sat.

He didn't.

"Leo slept for nine hours last night," he said. "He woke up once. He asked where you were."

Clara's chest tightened. "What did you tell him?"

"That you were at your house." He turned from the window. "He threw his breakfast at the wall."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be useful." He picked up a folder from the desk and set it in front of her. "Since Elena died, I've hired four nannies. Two had degrees in early childhood education. One worked for a senator's family. The longest lasted eleven days."

"Why did they leave?"

"He bit one. He screamed at the others until they cried. One of them quit because she found out who I am." He said it without inflection. "I want to offer you the position."

Clara stared at the folder without opening it.

"I'm not a nanny."

"You're the only person who's gotten him to hold someone's hand in six months. I don't care what you call yourself."

"Mr. Moretti—"

"Read the number."

She opened the folder.

She read the number.

Then she read it again, because she was sure she had added a zero.

It was more than she made at Il Destino in a year. It was enough to pay her rent through next summer. It was enough for Evan's college applications, for the dentist he'd been putting off, for a winter coat that didn't have a broken zipper.

She thought, unexpectedly, of her mother.

Of Diane Bennett coming home at seven in the morning in her scrubs, feet swollen, sitting at the kitchen table with a calculator and a stack of envelopes. Of the way she used to move money from one bill to another like a woman shifting sandbags against a flood, never enough to stop the water, only enough to slow it down.

Someday, her mother used to say, somebody's going to hand us a break, and we're going to be too tired to recognize it.

Diane had moved to Tampa three years ago with a man who sold boat insurance. She called on birthdays. She sent twenty-dollar bills in greeting cards.

She had never been handed a break.

Clara looked at the number again and felt something that wasn't quite relief and wasn't quite fear. It sat in her stomach like a stone.

Nothing this generous ever came free. She had learned that before she learned long division.

Clara closed the folder.

"Why?"

Rico frowned. "Why what?"

"Why so much?"

"Because I need you to say yes."

"And because you need me not to talk," Clara said quietly. "About anything I might see in this house."

The study was silent.

For a moment she thought she had gone too far. Then something shifted in Rico's face—not anger, but a kind of reluctant respect.

"You're not stupid," he said.

"No."

"Good. Stupid people get hurt." He sat down across from her, finally, and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "I won't pretend about my family. You've read the papers. Some of it is lies. Some of it isn't. But my son is not my business. He's my son. Whatever happens in this house, he will be kept out of it, and so will whoever takes care of him."

"You can't promise that."

"No," he admitted. "But I can promise I'll try harder than anyone has ever tried at anything."

Clara looked down at the folder in her lap.

She thought about the eviction notice. She thought about Evan eating dry cereal because there was no milk. She thought about a little boy saying Mommy made warm in a voice so small it barely existed.

"I have conditions," she said.

Rico's eyebrows rose slightly.

Very few people, she guessed, had ever said those words to him.

"Go on," he said.

---