Chapter 3

He didn't come near me for a week after that. Whatever he'd been doing to me, he stopped doing it.

Then he came into the sunroom and found me with a secondhand test-prep book, another kid's answers already pencilled in. He looked at it and left without a word.

Two days later a box of new ones came up to my room, and a woman named Ruth who came three afternoons a week to sit with me at the kitchen table.

Not long after, I went into the city for the day. When I got back the pool was full and it was warm. He never brought it up.

In October my chest closed up. I grew up in a house with mold in the walls and it finds me every fall; that one was bad and I was flat for four days.

He sat up with me for three of them and did whatever the doctor left instructions for himself instead of ringing for anybody. By the third night his eyes were as red as mine.

I'd like to tell you it was all of that. Mostly it was that he was very good-looking and I've never had much defense against it.

"People are going to talk," I said. "You in here every night."

"Let them."

"It doesn't bother you?"

He stood up so fast the chair went back on two legs. "Don't start getting ideas."

Then he crossed the room, got the mug off the tray, came back and put it into my hands wrong so I had to take it by the hot part.

"Careful," he said. "That's hot."

He'd been blowing on it the whole way across the room.

He bought me things after that. A coat. A watch. He paid out of the club he ran in the city instead of his mother's account, and he made sure I knew which it was.

He wasn't unfair about it either. Whatever came up to my room, the same thing came up to Genevieve's.

The next September he took us both down to the feast on Mulberry Street.

There's an old man who sets up on the corner every year with a table of glass. Birds, mostly. He makes one swallow a year and he won't sell it. A dollar buys a ticket in his jar and at nine o'clock he pulls one out.

"Not for sale," he told Genevieve when she asked his price. "It goes where it's meant to go."

Rafe bought three tickets like everyone else.

At nine the old man read out a number and it was his.

The swallow was the size of my thumb, blue at the throat. Genevieve already had her hand halfway out.

He put it in mine.

"Don't look at me like that," he said to her. "Your room's full of nice things. This one gives me a week of grief if I come home without it."

My sister's eyes went bright right there on the sidewalk, with people going around us.

"That's not why."

"Genny."

"It's not because she'd give you grief." She dragged her wrist across her face. "It's because you know your mother's already promised her to you."

He didn't move for a second.

Then he looked at me, not at her, and went to the car and drove off and left the two of us standing on Mulberry Street.

I got back to the house close to midnight and I could hear them from the side door.

The study door was open.

"You could have asked me. One time. You could have asked me one time and I'd have—"

"Rafe."

"I'd put a bullet in my own head before I marry that girl."

He came out of the study and walked straight into me.

He stopped. Whatever went across his face, I hadn't seen it there before.

"There it is," he said. "That's why you've been smiling at me like that."

"That's not how it—"

"All that sweetness." He was nodding to himself. "You two had it settled before I ever set eyes on you."

Camilla came out behind him and after that he wasn't taking anything in from anyone.

He looked past me at the stairs. Genevieve was standing halfway up with her shoes in her hand.

His face changed when he looked at her. Softer than anything I'd ever gotten.

"For what it's worth," he said, "if anybody had asked me, I'd have picked you."