"My father was not a bad man," Valentina said. "I want to be clear about that because the story sounds like it's about a bad man, and it isn't. He was ordinary. He was ordinary and he made an ordinary mistake and he owed an extraordinary amount of money to people who understood that children were a more reliable currency than promises."
She was sitting on the low bench in the garden, the one against the south wall where the shade held longest into the afternoon. Sera had found her there by accident, or the accident that wasn't entirely an accident, the kind of coincidence that happens between two people who have both learned the same quiet corner of a shared space.
"How old were you?" Sera said.
