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such a thing?” she demanded indignantly.
    “We both know there are people who would like to see the program fail, who would gloat if we lost our funding. They might even commit murder to bring us down.”
    “But why? What you do here is good.”
    “Not for those who want to recruit every young child into a gang. They’re afraid we might cut into their power.”
    “They are fools!” she declared dismissively. “And I have too much work to do to waste time on them.”
    As she left his office, Rick smiled at her vehemence. There was no chance that Maria would become one of the lost souls. Raised by two strict, doting, Catholic parents, she and her brothers had been taught right and wrong. Unlike so many others, they had been surrounded by love. They had been taught the value of hard work, grit and determination. There would be no shortcuts, no straying from the straight and narrow.
    When Juan Jesus, the youngest, had gotten too friendly with members of the toughest gang in the area, the entire family had come to Rick for guidance. Dollars had been scraped together for the tuition to a private school in Ken’s suburb. A family in Ken’s congregation had taken Juan Jesus in as one of their own on weekdays. Ken had brought him back to his family on Friday afternoons and picked him up again at dawn on Monday mornings for the trip north of town. Those days away from the hood had been the boy’s salvation.
    Only Maria knew that the small pittance the family had raised was a fraction of the actual tuition. Had the others known, they would have been too proud to accept the arrangements.
    Ever since discovering that Rick and Ken had chipped in to pay the rest, Maria had been coming to the program headquarters every morning to do whatever jobs needed doing. She typed. She answered phones. She cleaned. She bullied Rick into eating, when he would have forgotten. She stayed as long as he did, sometimes longer.
    Unofficially, she counseled the teenage girls who trusted her with secrets they might never have shared with Rick. All in all, Rick knew he’d gotten the better end of the deal when he’d made the contribution to Juan Jesus’s education. And when Maria had her college scholarship, he guessed she would study psychology or social work and make an even greater contribution to his program, or another like it.
    Now and again, when he saw the flash of passion in her eyes for Yo, Amigo’s goals, when he heard her sweet voice of reason working its magic on a potential backer, he could envision her in the state capital or in Washington, making a difference for all of the teens who seemed intent on sacrificing their youth, or their lives, to gangs. For now, he might be the brains and the drive behind Yo, Amigo, but Maria and a few others like her were its heart. Ken Miller had been its soul.
    Not a day passed that Rick didn’t miss him. Not an hour passed that he didn’t contemplate his own inadvertent complicity in bringing Ken into the barrio, where he died. Not a minute passed that he didn’t want to avenge his friend’s death.
    Thinking of that brought him full circle, back to the fury he’d read in Dana Miller’s eyes the night before. She was trouble, all right, and it was way past time he faced it. His warnings last night weren’t nearly enough to make her back down.
    “Maria, I’ve got to go out for a while,” he said as he passed the desk where she was trying to make sense of the piles of paperwork that accumulated on a daily basis, paperwork that Rick had no patience for, even when he understood the necessity for it.
    “I’ll be here,” she told him with a wry expression. “You haven’t touched this in a week. It will take me most of the day to see which is important and which could have been tossed into the trash, if only you’d bothered to read it.”
    “ Gracias. What would I do without you?”
    She shook her head. “I cannot imagine.”
    “Neither can I, nina. Neither can I.”
    “Then it is good