Chapter 6

I went to see Eli first, because he was the reason, and I had a bad feeling I no longer controlled the timeline.

The warming center hadn't seen him in four nights. The volunteer coordinator checked the log and shook her head. "People move," she said. "It's the cold. Sometimes they move to a different basement."

I had learned in litigation that the people you most need are usually three blocks away and invisible to you. I walked the Loop the way the invisible walk it - the 24-hour laundromat on Van Buren where men sleep upright in the plastic chairs with a dryer running for the heat; the Blue Line from Clark and Lake out to Forest Park and back, because the trains run warm all night; the day-labor van outside a hardware store at six in the morning, where a boy who is fourteen years old should never be standing.

He was standing there on the fifth morning. Hood up, hands jammed in his sleeves, waiting for a van he wasn't old enough to ride.

"They don't take you," I said, from six feet away, no closer. "You have to be eighteen."

"I know." He didn't look at me. "I come for the coffee."

"They give free coffee?"

"They give free coffee to workers." A pause. "I stand close."

I did not offer him money, food, a ride, or a room, because I had spent four nights cataloguing every kindness that would make him walk. What I said instead was the thing I had actually come to say.

"I found out where you're from. Not the name on the anklet - the whole of it. What was done and who did it and why." I kept my voice level, the way I would with a hostile witness who was also a child. "I can tell you. Or I can leave you alone. Those are the two things I have that don't insult you."

That made him look, quick, sideways, the way a person checks whether a door is really unlocked.

"How much do you want from me to hear it?" he said.

"Nothing. That's the part that's going to be hardest for you."

He was quiet for a while, watching the van fill and pull away and leave him in the slush.

"I'm not going to be your project," he said. "People take me places and it lasts till Christmas. I'm not doing that again. I'm not smiling for a picture. I'm not calling anybody Mom."

"I didn't ask you to."

"I'm saying it now so you hear it early."

"Noted," I said. "Loud and clear. Do you want coffee?"

"I want to know what they did," Eli said.

So I told him. Standing in the slush behind a hardware store at six in the morning, I told a fourteen-year-old that he had a twin brother who was alive and rich and sleeping in a penthouse four miles north, that his own grandmother had ordered him recorded stillborn, that his name had been taken off a birth record and put on a death certificate, and that the nurse who carried him out of the hospital had loved him enough to keep the anklet on him and not enough to keep the money coming.

He listened with his arms crossed and his eyes down, and when I was done he said exactly one thing, and it was not what I expected.

"Does he know about me?"

"Not the whole truth."

"Does he want to?"

"I don't know yet," I said honestly. "He's fourteen. He's scared. His whole life just got a second floor."

Eli nodded slowly, and then he said the thing that told me what kind of person I was dealing with, the kind I could build a case on.

"Then he should hear it from me," he said. "Not from you."

It was the first time in five days I felt anything like hope.