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loosen. “Please do not make this more difficult that it has to be,” he said.
    Kimberly stared for a long moment, then straightened herself and jerked her arm away. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going.” Trying her best to be stoic, she silently followed the goon back up toward the house, ignoring the tickle of the blood tracing down her shins. From the foyer, she could see the invaders inside, sifting through all the things that did not belong to them. She hated these men more now than at any other moment in her life. Her dad was nowhere to be seen, already taken into another room somewhere, for God only knew what purpose.
    Over near the stairs, Captain Quintero sensed the movement and turned his handsome face to greet her. “I thought you left,” he said.
    “This goon chased me down,” Kimberly spat. “Look what he did to me.” She gestured to her bleeding knees, but the captain seemed unmoved.
    “I thought she was running away,” the soldier said quickly. He sounded as if he were whining. “If you said—”
    Quintero dismissed the soldier’s concern with a wave of his hand. “Let her go,” he said. “She is not important to us.”
    And just like that, she was free.
     
    This time, as Kimberly ran, the soldiers stepped out of the way to let her pass. As she burst through the cordon at the foot of her driveway, she stopped and gasped as she saw a second cordon forming up at the bottom of the hill. “My God, what’s happening?” she asked to the night.
    She needed a phone. She also needed a home and a bed and her books for the biology test tomorrow. She needed her mother and her father, and even her annoying little brother. For the time being, though, all she had was the still night air. And her fear.
    The party. They would have a phone. She could call somebody from the Arosemenas’ house. She could call Mom. She always knew what to do.
    The panic started to build exponentially now, and Kimberly found herself struggling for control. She had the phone book, didn’t she? Surely the number was there. It had to be; that was why God had prompted her to take it in the first place.
    Except for the Muses, it seemed that everyone who lived on the street was related to each other, all of them an offshoot of the Arosemenafamily: uncles, cousins, grandparents, and assorted friends and hangers-on. When they threw a party, it was always packed to the rafters, and this one was no exception. Desperate for help, Kimberly knocked heavily on the front door.
    The girl who answered it, Maria, was a neighborhood acquaintance,and she instantly read the panic on Kimberly’s face. “ Dios mio , what’s wrong?”
    Kimberly stepped past her into the entryway. “I need a telephone.”
    Maria looked past the new arrival at the cluster of cars and soldiers on the street, then shot a concerned look.
    “My father’s been arrested,” Kimberly said. “I need to call my mother.”
    Nicole, a second acquaintance, joined them in the foyer.
    “Señor Muse has been arrested,” Maria told her, eliciting the gasp she’d no doubt been expecting. “But I’m sure everything will be just fine.”
    “It’s not going to be fine!” Kimberly screamed, bringing silence to everyone around her. She felt the heat of their eyes and in that moment, she seethed with anger. She was angry at all of them for their pity and for the normalcy of their lives. “Now, can I use your phone or not?”

4
    It’s terrible watching a relative die. The hospice in West Palm did its best to keep the experience manageable, but at the end of the day, it was a place dedicated to death. The slowly decaying shell that Annie Muse had moved into the hospital bed three days ago was not the vital Aunt Elsa whom she’d come to adore. The second wife to Annie’s grandfather, who had predeceased her by quite a number of years, Aunt Elsa was a force of nature, always on the go, always doingsomething at full speed. She still tried, even as the cancer moved from her