The first four nights had been inside their mother’s old Buick, parked behind a closed laundromat outside Asheville, North Carolina. The next three had been in a church shelter where Ruby slept with one eye open because the volunteers kept saying things like, “If you’re under eighteen, honey, we have protocols.” Ruby knew what protocols meant. It meant someone decided a seventeen-year-old girl and her eleven-year-old brother were safer apart than together.
The last five nights had been under the broad concrete mouth of an overpass where the traffic above sounded like constant rain.
Ruby had made a little home there out of what the city had thrown away. A cracked plastic tote held canned ravioli, crackers, socks, a flashlight, and the yellow legal envelope that contained every document she still owned: her birth certificate, Noah’s school records, their mother’s death certificate, and a folded eviction notice stained with coffee.
Noah slept with his sneakers on. Ruby had taught him that. If trouble came, you never wanted to waste time tying laces.
That morning, the air tasted like iron. Storm weather.
Ruby knelt beside a gas station bathroom sink, using a paper towel to wipe grime off Noah’s cheeks while he stared at himself in the mirror.
“You look normal,” she said.
