The incision closed properly under the adhesive strips and the redness went out of it by the end of the second week.

She finished the sample antibiotics.

She gained back some of the nine pounds she had lost in the hospital.

She did not contact anyone.

Not once.

She thought about her brother — she thought about him constantly, in the way she always had, as a shape at the edge of things — and there was no one else.

And she got to know a boy who did not talk.

Leo Vance was small for seven, dark-haired, and observant in a way that was frankly unnerving.