The crying had been going on for eighty-seven minutes when Leah started counting.
Thirty-one. Then forty-two. Then she stopped, because counting had stopped helping.
The sound came from behind the curtain at the front of the plane, where the seats went flat and the glasses were glass and the air smelled like somebody else’s money. It wasn’t the thin, hiccupping wail of a tired baby. It was ragged. Worn down to the bone. A sound that had already spent everything it had.
A flight attendant hurried past with a bottle. Five minutes later she came back with a blanket. Ten minutes after that she came back with nothing at all and a face like a closed door.
“Refused three bottles,” Leah heard her whisper. “I don’t know what else to try.”
Leah looked down at Maya.
Her sister was three, asleep, one fist curled around the ear of a stuffed rabbit that had once been gray and was now mostly gray-brown. Curls stuck to her forehead. Her breathing was slow and even, and Leah counted it the way she counted everything now — six in, six out — because counting was the only thing keeping her hands still.
Four days ago, she had been standing on kitchen tile in bare feet.
A suitcase in the overhead bin. Two hundred and seventy-four euros folded inside a sock. A phone with no messages from her mother. A travel letter signed eleven months earlier for a trip that never happened.
Rome. Aunt Celia. One job: keep Maya safe.
Nothing else.
The baby screamed again, and this time the sound broke in the middle, the way a voice does when there’s no air left to spend.
Leah’s jaw tightened.
She knew that cry.
She’d heard it from Maya on the bad nights, when the house went quiet in the wrong way, when the office door downstairs stayed shut and their mother was always “traveling for work.”
She tucked the blanket around Maya’s shoulders.
Then she stood up.
The curtain to first class was three steps away. The security guard was already in the aisle, and he’d seen her coming before she arrived.
“Back to your seat.”
“I think I know what’s wrong.”
He was enormous — shoulders like a doorway, hands folded like he’d done this a thousand times. He didn’t move.