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ticket. Tell her thank you.”
    “Jenni,” Maria started.
    “I want to be there,” Jenn said. “I need to be there when he wakes up, especially if … God, most people don’t get that chance. I’m going to be there.”
    “Jenn, he might not wake up.”
    “But he’s strong,” Jenn reminded her. “He’s a fighter. Just tell Savannah. I can be at the airport in an hour.”
    Danny
was
strong. He
was
a fighter.
    But all young men and women who went to fight wars were strong. They were all fighters. And sometimes, despite that, they died anyway.
    Jenn looked at Jack, who was still holding her hand.
    And sometimes they lost their legs.
L AS V EGAS
D ATE U NKNOWN
    For too many years, there was no such thing as no in Neesha’s world.
    Dissent was not allowed, not without punishment.
    Years ago, when she was first brought to this awful place, punishment meant an empty belly and nothing but a hard, cold floor to sleep upon, a faucet for water, and a bucket for her waste, while locked in a tiny, empty cell. That was often all it took among the other new girls to turn a no into a yes.
    But in those early days, Neesha preferred the hunger, the bucket, and the cold floor to the pain and humiliation that came when the men—the clients or visitors, they were called—held her down with the weight of their bodies and jabbed themselves between her legs.
    It was wrong, and she would
not
do it ever again.
    And she screamed and cried, which frightened the visitors, and kept them from touching her. It also made the tall man with the florid face who was her new lord and master angry, so he locked her again in that cell.
    The hunger made her cry, but she still said no. And then a fellow worker, a girl who was older, saved part of her meals to share. She furtively passed the morsels through the tiny window in Neesha’s door. And so she put up with that hard, cold floor for nine whole days and nights of no, with only twinges of hunger instead of great, yawning pain.
    But the tall man—Mr. Nelson—he must have found out about the food, because the kind girl vanished. Neesha hadn’t seen her again, not even once in all of the years since.
    It was then that Mr. Nelson brought Neesha and her no into a beautiful room—more beautiful than she’d ever seen before in her entire short life—where a magnificent meal was set out on a huge table.
    He’d left her there, and Neesha, still hungry, had eaten her fill, filled, too, with hope that her grandfather, a man her mother hadspoken of with such affection and respect, had somehow managed to find and rescue her.
    But when a man came in, while he was, indeed, old enough to be her grandfather, he had a face as pale and a head as bare of hair as the moon. His eyes were not like Neesha’s or her mother’s. They were blue and flatly ugly, as if his soul had already left his body.
    And although she hadn’t yet learned to speak any American, she knew what he wanted from his gestures.
    When she gave him her emphatic no, he smiled. And he didn’t just take what he wanted anyway, like the other men before him, hands trembling and even weeping while they’d kissed her, before she’d learned that her piercing screams would scare them away when simply sobbing wouldn’t.
    Instead, he took while he beat her, and he laughed with delight even as she screamed. And then he took some more in ways that were meant to hurt her, until she lay naked and bleeding, too stunned to cry, on that beautiful floor.
    The man washed himself after, whistling as he did so, and then he left.
    Women came in then, but they weren’t warm like her mother had been, back before she’d fallen ill and died. They cleaned Neesha and bandaged her as best they could, but they did it without any comfort or kind words. In fact, they spoke to her sternly.
You reap what you sow
.
    And then they brought her back to her cell, where she wept until she fell asleep.
    The door didn’t open for three very hungry, very sore days as she lay