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didn’t think . . . I’m sorry.” It was the most awkward handful of words to come out of my mouth probably ever. It was self-conscious and tongue-tied five times over, but it seemed to mean something to Stefan. The darkness in his eyes lightened a little.
    He cleared his throat and replied, “Thanks, but he was your father too, even if you don’t remember.”
    I nodded silently and went on into the big house with trim the color of half-fresh mint green and half-faded lavender. As I did, I heard the lid being hammered back onto the paint can. Anatoly was gone and there was Stefan covered with paint, doing a job his father would’ve had hired someone to in turn hire someone else to actually do. If it didn’t involve a gun or a knife, manual labor was far beneath him, I imagined. But he was the man who’d bought Stefan his first bike or at least had been the one to give it to him after having his own handyman put it together. Stefan had mentioned the bike. Anatoly probably wasn’t there for school things . . . whatever school things there were—plays or football. But he’d been there for Christmases, Thanksgivings, birthdays, at least half the nights of the week. I’d seen the pictures when recuperating in South Carolina. I doubt he’d hugged Stefan much, though, except when he was younger than three. A web strung together from what Stefan had told me and what logic trumped. That was what I thought and with years of being near the top of my class in psychological training, and, with a failing grade being a failure at survival, I thought I guessed right.
    Stefan had once said Anatoly thought I’d hung the sun and the moon—that I was special. I honestly didn’t care what Anatoly had thought about long-ago Lukas. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t the thought that counts. What did count was a rescue ten years later by a brother who had refused to give up.
    I knocked on the door to the house and as the sign, painted in loops and whirls with tulips and roses, told me to, I went on inside. There, Mrs. Sloot—“Adelaide, sweetie. Call me Adelaide”—tried to stuff me with sugar cookies. “Such a skinny boy.” I might be almost six feet, but I didn’t look nineteen. Seventeen was the best I could hope for, but I could’ve looked fifty and still had grandmotherly women trying to shove food down me. It happened all the time.
    I learned to live with it, take the cookies, and be grateful I was too old for them to pinch my cheek—although the lady in one of the tourist shops in town had, only a different cheek. I hadn’t told Stefan. He would either laugh or break her arm, and arm breaking wasn’t part of the whole lying low thing. “Yes, Miss Adelaide, water’s everywhere. Harry’s going home to fix it.”
    Her poodle jumped at my feet, then nipped me on the ankle as she tsk ed about our bad luck and gave me another cookie. “Oh, Parker, sweetie, look at my new tchotchke. I know you like animals. Sookie-Sue loves you. You’ll think it’s cute as can be.” I did like animals and Sookie-Sue was the first one to not like me back, but. . . .
    It was too late. She’d shoved a small statue into my hand. It was an armadillo, I guessed dubiously, dressed like a clown, with a happy pointy smile, soulless red eyes, and balloons held in a gloved hand. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. “It’s nice,” I lied effortlessly. I hadn’t been an enthusiastic student at the Institute, but I had been a good one. Sookie-Sue nipped me again. I sighed patiently, but I did like all animals, including the ones that made it a challenge, and I didn’t nudge her away. “What is it?”
    Adelaide pursed her lips, coated with bright orangered lipstick to match her hair, and her drawn-on eye-brows arched. “I told you, dear: it’s a tchotchke.”
    My own eyebrows, and I