Page 97 of Cruel Lies

"It's alright," I tell them. "We're friends of Miss Louisa."

The wordfrienddoes its work. They shrug and go back to their game.

There's a woman at the front desk, gray-haired and round, who looks up and breaks into a smile when she sees me. "Mr. Akov!" She leaps up and comes around the desk. "We weren't expecting you today."

"I don't like to be expected, Dana."

"No, you never do."

Louisa Duffy has run this place for eleven years. She doesn't know what I am. She knows I'm a lawyer who cuts a check every quarter that keeps the lights on, the pantry full, and the roof from leaking. That's all she needs to know. That's all anyone needs to know.

"The new A/C is working," she says, leading us down the hall. "The children aren't sweating through their bedsheets anymore. Come. Come see."

Navi trails behind us, hands in his pockets, quiet for once. He knows what this place is to me. He's the only one who does.

We walk past the common room, where a handful of kids are sprawled on a rug in front of a bookshelf. Past the little dining hall with its long tables and mismatched chairs. Past the stairwell that goes up to the dormitories.

It's clean. It's warm. It's safe.

That's the whole point.

Louisa shows us the new A/C unit, and the new washing machines, and the reading nook she carved out of a closet with the last check I sent. She talks the whole time without interruption from me. I like listening to her talk about the kids.This one's reading above grade level. That one finally slept through the night. This one got adopted by a nice family in Queens.

They're small victories. But real ones.

Nobody's throwing glass here.

When Louisa gets pulled away by a crying toddler, Navi and I end up standing by a window at the end of the hall. It looks out on a scrubby little courtyard where a swing set catches the morning sun.

"You ever going to tell her?" Navi asks.

"Tell her what?"

"Where the money comes from."

"The money that keeps this place running is clean," I say. "I make sure of it. That's what all of this isfor."

Navi doesn't argue. He just looks out the window with me.

"Your mother would've liked it," he says after a while. "I bet it would've made her happy knowing there was a safe, happy place with her name on it."

I think about her sometimes, standing in this hall. She didn't live long enough to do that. My mother, Anna, was a woman who gotsmaller and smaller, year on year, until there was nothing left of her at all. She thought if she took up less room, there'd be less of her for her husband to hurt.

She was wrong.

The last year of her life, she barely spoke above a whisper. She moved through the house like a ghost, like she was practicing for not existing. And then one day, she stopped practicing.

I was fifteen.

"He never hit her where it showed," I murmur. I don't know why I say it. It just comes out. "My father. He was smart about it. He'd break a glass against the wall right by her head and let the pieces land on her feet. Never a mark. But he knew that fear does more than fists ever could."

Navi is quiet.

"She'd sweep it up," I say. "Every single time. On her hands and knees, picking up the glass, so I wouldn't step on it. Sohewouldn't step on it. She'd apologize tohimwhile she did it. For cleaning a mess he made." I press my knuckle against the window frame until it hurts. "I built this place so that no child would ever have to see what I saw. So no woman would ever have to sweep up glass and say sorry for it."

"Ro…"

"I'm fine."