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of paper.
    “I’m really freaked out,” she confessed. Her eyes were red-rimmed.
    He took a deep breath. The appointment was running over. It was eating up his break time, guaranteeing that he’d have to rush other patients later. He’d be late getting home to Theo—more hours the boy would spend alone, less time they could spend together this evening. Tonight would be devoted to whatever punishment Ethan meted out for the signature forging and whatever fight Theo put up.
    But there was no sidestepping—no rushing—Nicole Freyer’s kind of anxiety. She needed his reassurance, and she needed it now. And if delivering bad news was the worst part of his work, at least he could do the best possible job of delivering it sensitively and patiently. “This kind of thing often turns out to be nothing,” he said as gently as he could. “I’m very conservative. I refer kids for hundreds of tests and evaluations that don’t turn out to be anything worth worrying about.”
    Some of the creases in her forehead smoothed out. “Like Mary’s Lyme test in the spring,” she said. “That turned out to be a false alarm.”
    “Exactly.”
    He held the door open. He stood well back as she passed by, but if she’d thought of making another attempt on him she gave no sign of it, only stepped through the door with Mary in tow.
    He was relieved when she was gone.
    When Ana got home to Hawthorne that night, someone had left the front door of her triple-decker apartment building open, a kid’s sneaker propped inside. She kicked the sneaker out of the way and let the door close behind her. She wished people wouldn’t do that. This wasn’t Beacon, where you could leave your car unlocked in the driveway, your fancy GPS and iPod Nano sitting on the front seat, and have a fighting chance they’d be there in the morning.
    That would be nice.
    What would it be like to live that way, with your sense of safety justified? A life where simple contentment was not a punishable offense?
    She dug in the outer pocket of her backpack for the key to her family’s unit on the second floor.
    Thinking that way was a waste of her energy, because this was her life, and this, or some close variant of it, would always be her life. That was what her mother had signed herup for all those years ago when she’d failed to extend the visas. And Ana had done a damn good job of not wallowing in regret. She’d made something of herself, the most that could be made under the circumstances. She was proud of what she’d done, proud of not getting sucked into self-pity. She wouldn’t start now, despite Ed Branch.
    She walked up the stairs to their apartment, let herself in. Her sister lay on the ugly orange-and-brown-plaid wool couch, watching TV.
    “ Saludos , sis.” Cara didn’t break eye contact with an episode of Dancing with the Stars.
    “Hey.” Behind the TV noise, Ana heard her nephews in their bedroom, and loud music from the apartment below. She set her backpack on the floor beside the couch. The living room was only slightly larger than Ed Branch’s office but neat, empty of the kids’ books and clothes. Cara must have straightened up.
    Cara reached out a hand to pat her sister’s arm. “Cómo estás?” They always spoke Spanish—or, really, Spanglish—at home.
    “Estoy cansado.” —“I’m tired.”
    Ana sat on the sagging couch beside her sister’s bulky form, untied her sneakers, and kicked them off. She threw herself against the cushions and put her feet up on the ancient glass-topped coffee table. There was another chair, an overstuffed armchair upholstered in rust velvet, where Ricky usually sat, but it was empty now. All the furniture faced the towering flat-screen TV.
    She didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, how Ricky had managed to afford the TV. She knew he hadn’t stolen it outright, and that was enough for her. It had to be. No drugs beyond alcohol and pot, no gang membership, no theft, and with those three