“I thought I was hungry, but I wasn’t.”

She opens a graceful hand, palm up, slightly curled fingertips a few inches from the plate. “You want I take?”

“Sure. Thanks. Sorry to waste it.”

“Not waste,” she says. “Can give to kid. You know? Some kid not have eat.” She raises the fingertips to her mouth, looking uncertain. “Boss not know.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell him.” This girl, and others like her, had helped Miaow survive, sometimes with their boss’s knowledge and sometimes without, when she was on the street.

When she was being protected by-

The vision of the boy who pushed past him on the sidewalk is suddenly in his mind again. And it brings with it a jumbled confusion of impressions and emotions: kindness and violence, hope and disappointment, failure. Mostly, and most deeply, failure. A failure he has hoped a thousand times to be able to rectify. He has prayed for a chance to rectify it.

But he looks at everything he’s facing at the moment, at the danger and the isolation, and his only thought is, Please, not now.

THE BOY DOESN’T come.

Da sits there, the inverted red bowl as conspicuous to her as a fire on the sidewalk, terrified that Kep will suddenly materialize, swearing at her, threatening her. Maybe snatching Peep away from her.

She constantly scans the crowd for the blue shirt. Twice she glimpses blue and grabs the bowl and holds it upright, but it’s someone else both times. Someone who doesn’t look anything like Kep.

She thinks, I could get up and walk away myself.

And go where? says a voice in her head. And do what? You couldn’t take care of yourself before, when you were alone. And now look at you, you’re stuck with a baby. And you’re waiting for this boy? You don’t even know anything about him.

“I do too,” Da says aloud, without realizing it. “I saw him disappear.” One minute he had been there, and an instant later he wasn’t. She had recognized it then. This place was his forest, just as the land around her village had been her forest. She’d grown up there, gotten into danger there, escaped it there. She’d known where to go, how to live there, what was safe and what wasn’t. If someone had been lost there, Da would have been the person to trust.

Trust, the voice says. Why do you think you can trust him?

Da thinks, Because his face was clean. Because his clothes were dirty but his face was scrubbed. There was something about him that said he was more than he seemed to be. And because she believes that she can sometimes see things in people that are invisible to others.

Blue down the sidewalk. She grabs her bowl and turns it upright. As she watches Kep stride down the sidewalk, she pulls the coins from her pocket and drops them inside. Looking away, as though she doesn’t know he’s coming to get her, she raises the bowl.

RAFFERTY CLAPS HIS hands twice. With the floor covered by the cheap, worn rug, taken from a dusty room full of stuff that tenants have abandoned over the years, and with blankets tacked to two walls to create a soft corner, the sound of the clap dies immediately. The sheets hung over the windows soak up the echoes, too. When he’d started putting the pieces together, two hours ago, the sound had reverberated with a spang like a gunshot in a tunnel. The acoustic revisions were made between trips to the eighth floor every seven or eight minutes to make some noise for the microphones until Rose and Miaow came home, but for the past ninety minutes he’s been able to stay on the fourth floor. He’s finished making the place functional with a chipped and splintered coffee table flanked by two rattan chairs adopted from the leave-behind room, one of which sags drunkenly to the right, and a wooden stool, painted apple green, with a crack running down the center of the seat that widens when it’s sat on and snaps back closed again quickly enough to pinch the sitter’s bottom.

Pinch or not, this is better. This will work.

His watch says 4:50. Miaow had been sulky when she peeked into the fourth-floor apartment on her way up, practically rolling her eyes at Rafferty’s efforts. For all Rafferty knows, she and Rose are planning her new life, her life as Mia, right now. Father of the year, he thinks, not even realizing that his newly introverted daughter is going through a crisis. When he finds his way out of this mess, he’s going to rethink this whole fatherhood thing. He’s obviously not doing it right. He knows nothing about little girls. And his own father, who abandoned the family when Rafferty was seventeen, didn’t provide much in the way of a paternal role model. But he’ll do better.

It’s comforting to look forward to a time when he can focus on being a better father. When Miaow’s problems will be as important to him as they are to her.

“Looks great,” someone says. “You’ve got a real eye for decoration.”

Rafferty turns to see Lieutenant Kosit leaning against the edge of the doorway. He is in street clothes, and looped over his thick fingers is the handle of a fancy plastic shopping bag from an electronics shop on Silom.

“I think the blankets provide a kind of unexpected élan,” Rafferty says. “Who would ever have believed those colors would go together?”

Kosit says, “No one.” He holds out the bag. “You owe me seven thousand baht.”

“Jesus. I’m not using it for opera.”

“You needed some way to jack it into your speakers, right? Well, that’s where they get you. Connectors. That’s where they got you, anyway.” He fishes out a receipt and flaps it in Rafferty’s direction. “See? Connectors, twenty-three hundred baht.”

“How about we forget the money and I come over and redecorate your apartment?”

Kosit looks around the room with great interest. “Sure. I have a cute little French maid’s outfit, all black and white with ruffles. I haven’t been able to talk anyone into wearing it.”

Rafferty says, “Will you take a check?”

IN THE ELEVATOR Rafferty says, “Seen much of Arthit?”

“Nobody has. He’s like the Ghost of the Station. You see him around corners once in a while, but by the time you get there, he’s disappeared.”

Rafferty sags against the wall. “Hell.”

“What’s wrong?” Kosit asks. “You two are close. I tried to ask him what was going on, and he practically bit my nose off.”

“Problems of some kind. He won’t talk to me either.”

“Must be bad, then. You guys are like a pair of gloves.”

“It’s bad. Listen, do whatever you can, okay? Even if he acts like you’re imposing and he’d be happy if you fell off the edge of the earth, just sort of take his temperature every so often. He may need help any time, and you know him. He’d rather die than ask for it.”

“I know. I mean, I’m a guy, but he takes it to ridiculous lengths.”

The elevator stops. Before the doors open, Rafferty says, “Remember, don’t say anything inside.”

Kosit nods and claps a hand to his mouth, and Rafferty crosses the hall and opens the door.

Rose and Miaow are in the living room. A heavy, unmistakably toxic chemical odor punches him in the nose. Miaow is sitting on the hassock with a towel over her shoulders and something slick and gleaming-vegetable oil or petroleum jelly, maybe-spread over her forehead and cheeks. She’s as shiny as a potato bug. Rose, who has a mouth full of Q-tips, is wearing rubber gloves and combing something viscous through Miaow’s thick hair, which has been parted even more ruler-straight than usual. His daughter doesn’t meet his eyes, but she registers Kosit behind him and slams her lids shut as though that could make both men disappear.

Rose says around the Q-tips, “Don’t distract me. Whatever you want in the kitchen, you know how to find it.”

“Yes, I love you, too. I think it’s time for a beer.” He gives Kosit raised eyebrows and gets a nod, so Rafferty goes into the kitchen, the bullet holes in the linoleum and the cabinet looking as big as lunar craters, and pops the refrigerator door. “Which do I want?” he asks aloud. “Singha,” he says, holding up one finger, “or Tiger?” He holds up another.