And he had done all of it with the pure, sunny confidence of a child who has never once suspected that the truth might be complicated, that a lady in your house could be anything other than exactly what she appeared to be, that grown-ups build whole cathedrals of fear and secrecy on top of facts a five-year-old just says out loud.
There was something almost holy in it, his obliviousness.
He’d been handed a secret and a bribe of stickers and had kept it about as well as any five-year-old keeps anything, which is to say not at all, the instant it became interesting.
And thank God for that, in a way, because his blurted little bombshell had cost me fifteen minutes of terror but had also given me, right here in a grocery store, the earliest possible sight of the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me.
Yara let out a long, breathless laugh and sagged back against the bakery case, fanning herself with one hand.
“I genuinely thought you were about to put me through the artisan bread display, Mrs. — Fern.”