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all—the fathers of their babies, the mistakes that have been made, the families they’ve disappointed. It is against the rules for the girls to tell one another their last names, and she suspects that most of the first names are pseudonyms as well. Like the girl who knits, who says her name is Dominique.
Dominique,
like the title of the popular song from grade school, the song by the Singing Nun.
    “Oh, really,” Nora says. “That’s an unusual name.” And the knitting girl looks down. She has dark eyebrows that meet in the middle of her face, right above the bridge of her nose, and her chocolate-colored eyes focus on the movement of the needles between her fingers. She is a girl who is used to being made fun of, the sort of girl who clutches her books tightly in front of her and plunges through the hallways of high school like she is walking into a blizzard. Nora knew of a girl like this back in Little Bow, a girl named Alice, which they all thought was funny. A Lice, they called her, and the boys sat behind her and flicked their boogers into her badly permed hair. A man who would make a girl like Alice or Dominique pregnant would have to be entirely evil, Nora decides.
    “What are you knitting?” Nora says at last, but the girl keeps her head down stubbornly, as such girls will. Someone, their mother probably, taught them to
suffer silently
, taught them
sticks and stones will hurt my bones, but words will never hurt me,
taught them
a quiet girl is better loved
. Dominique pinches her lips as Nora looks at her.
    “Well,” Nora says, after the silence extends for a time. “It’s pretty, whatever it is.”
    “It’s a blanket,” says Dominique, finally. “It’s just a blanket. It’s cold in this place.”
    “Yes,” Nora says. “It’s going to be a long winter!” she says, reminding herself unpleasantly of her father, his cheerful, commonplace chatter. For a minute she hates him, misses him, hates him, misses him, like flipping a coin or plucking petals off a flower.
    ——
    It will be a long time before she sees her father again. This is another one of the rules: relatives are not allowed to visit the girls at Mrs. Glass House, and she recalls her father’s sorrowful, doubtful eyes as the matron, Mrs. Bibb, recited this to him. Mrs. Bibb is one of the horrors in a long list of horrors, with her orange hair and freckles and her cheerful, caustic blandness. A person incapable of either cruelty or kindness, Nora imagined, only an indifferent
nice
. It was terrifying, listening to her sweet voice, but what could be done? Nora was expressionless as her father looked at her shyly, as if she might advise him, as if she could tell him what to say or think. “Well, I suppose,” he said, and Nora imagined that he was waiting for her to intervene, to lose her nerve, to cry out, “Daddy, don’t leave me in this place!” Mrs. Bibb seemed to be preparing herself silently for just such a scene.
    “Honey . . . ?” her father said, but Nora didn’t say anything to him. She stared down at the ribbed upholstery of the easy chair she was sitting in. He knew what she thought, he knew what her decision was.
    Originally, his own ideas had been quite different. “Just tell me his name,” her father had said. “I’ll talk to him, he’ll do the right thing. I can promise you that.”
    But she shook her head. “No,” she said.
    For a while, he’d tried to argue. “It’s his responsibility, too,” her father said. “Believe me, he’d want to know what’s going on. You just have to give him the chance. You think you know everything, Missy, but you know, I think that most men, they think that it’s their baby, too. Men are not so different as you might think.
    “Did he rape you, is that it?” her father said.
    “Are you protecting somebody? He’s married, isn’t he?” her father said. “If he comes around here, I’ll know it’s him. I’ll know it’s him, and I’ll kill him, you know that, don’t