Chapter 2 - The Sound of Practice
Gavin stopped five feet from the bench.
The wind caught the loose snow at the curb, lifting it in a blinding white curtain that for a second swallowed the yellow halo of the lamp, the iron slats, and the child.
In the sudden stillness that followed the gust, the small voice came again.
“It wasn't my fault.”
It was spoken into the folds of the worn blue canvas bag, the syllables clipped and level, as if they had been rehearsed in a dark room until the panic had worn smooth around the edges.
Gavin’s chest tightened—not with the standard, philanthropic pity he had learned to project from gala stages, but with something older and sharper. He knew that tone. It was the sound of a child who had been told, over and over, that whatever disaster had occurred in the household was somehow anchored to her own weight, her own breath, her own inconvenient existence.
“Hey,” Gavin said.
His voice was lower than he intended, roughened by the winter air and the dry, stale atmosphere of the ballroom he had just abandoned.
The child didn’t jump.
That was what broke his stride completely. A normal child—a lost child, a cold child—would have startled, would have looked up with wide, frantic eyes. This little girl merely shifted her weight by a millimeter, tightening her grip on the canvas bag until her knuckles showed white against the blue cloth.
“The snow’s sticking to your coat,” Gavin said, taking two slow steps closer. He didn’t want to loom. To a child lying on frozen iron, a six-foot-two man in an expensive wool overcoat looked like a cliff about to give way. “You’re going to freeze out here. Where’s your mom?”
Slowly, the small head turned.
Her face was pinched, her lips cracked and dry, but her eyes were an impossible, startling shade of amber—the exact color of whiskey held up to a dying light.
“She’s at the store,” the girl said.
“What store is open at midnight in the middle of a blizzard, kiddo?”
“The big one,” she whispered. “With the lights.”
Gavin looked around. There were no all-night grocers for six blocks in this direction, only the back entrances of apartment buildings, a closed florist shop, and the park perimeter.
“What’s your name?”
“Mila,” she said.
“Mila what?”
The amber eyes didn’t waver. “Just Mila.”
Gavin reached down, unbuttoning his heavy overcoat. The cold air rushed immediately against his suit shirt, biting through the fabric, but he didn’t hesitate. He stripped the coat off and draped it over the child’s small, shivering shoulders. It swallowed her completely, the hem trailing down into the gray slush of the sidewalk.
“Get up, Mila,” Gavin said softly, extending a hand. “We’re going to get some hot chocolate. And then we’re going to figure out where the ‘big store’ is.”
Mila stared at his gloved hand for a long, agonizing beat.
Then, very cautiously, she let go of the blue canvas bag with one hand and placed her small, ice-cold fingers into his palm.
May you like
As she stood, something heavy shifted inside the canvas bag with a dull, metallic clink.
Gavin didn’t ask what was inside. Not yet. But as he led her toward the bright, glowing lights of a twenty-four-hour diner three blocks down, his mind was already racing past the snow, past the gala, and into a territory far darker than he had ever bargained for.
