MAFIA BOSS HADN'T LAUGHED SINCE HIS WIFE DIED THREE YEARS AGO—BUT WHEN A POOR CLEANER'S FIVE-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER MADE HIM LAUGH IN SECONDS, HIS OWN LITTLE GIRL STOOD WATCHING WITH TEARS IN HER EYES!

For three years, I had imagined what it would feel like to hear my father laugh again.

I thought it would be warm. I thought the sound would fill our enormous, quiet house and chase the shadows from the corners. I thought I would be the one to make it happen. Maybe I would tell him the perfect joke, or bring home a drawing so beautiful he could not help himself. Maybe on my ninth birthday, he would finally smile when I blew out the candles.

Instead, he laughed for Zoe Turner, a girl whose backpack was held together with duct tape.

And I heard myself ask the question I had been too frightened to say aloud.

“Daddy, why can you smile for her, but not for me?”

Everything outside Saint Agnes Academy seemed to stop. A taxi hissed through a puddle. A school bus grumbled at the curb. One of my father's bodyguards raised his hand to his earpiece, then let it fall. Zoe's little smile vanished.

My father was still half out of the sedan, one polished shoe on the sidewalk. He looked at me as if I had said something in a language he knew but had forgotten how to speak.

“Violet,” he said.

He had not called me sweetheart in a very long time. He said my name carefully these days, the way grown-ups said fragile or expensive things.

I tightened my fingers around the straps of my pink backpack. “I tried everything.”

His eyes went to the backpack, then to my face.

“I know.”

“No, you don't.” My voice cracked, and I hated that everyone could hear it. “I made you twenty-seven cards. I counted them. You put them in the drawer without looking at the backs.”

He looked down.

I wished he would argue. I wished he would tell me I was wrong, because that would mean he had looked at the cards and remembered them. But my father, who could make powerful men apologize by staring at them, had no words for me.

Zoe took a tiny step closer. “I didn't mean to,” she whispered.

I looked at her. She seemed even smaller than she had a minute before, standing between the armored car and two men with black coats. Her cheeks were pink from the wind.

“I know,” I told her. “You didn't do anything wrong.”

And I meant it. At least, I wanted to mean it badly enough that the words came out.

My father crouched so his eyes were closer to mine. The movement made the bodyguards exchange surprised glances. Dominic Moretti did not kneel on city sidewalks.

“I didn't know you felt that way,” he said.

“That's because you don't ask.”

He flinched. Just a little, but I saw it.

From the school doors, a woman called Zoe's name. She hurried toward us wearing a blue custodial jacket over a plain sweater. Her dark hair had escaped its clip, and a streak of soap foam dried white across one sleeve. Mrs. Turner. She cleaned the classrooms after the other mothers drove away in shiny cars.

“Zoe, honey, what are you doing?”

Zoe ran into her arms. “I told the joke.”

Mrs. Turner's gaze moved to my father. Whatever she saw in his face made her hold Zoe more tightly.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “She wasn't supposed to bother anyone.”

“She didn't bother me,” my father replied.

His voice sounded different. Softer. But when he looked toward me, I could not stand another second of being watched.

“Can we go home?” I asked.

He nodded. One guard opened the rear door. Another walked around to check the street. I climbed into the car without taking his offered hand.

Before the door closed, I saw a man across the road lift a phone and aim it toward us. He wore a long gray coat and stood beneath the awning of a shuttered bookstore. His phone followed Mrs. Turner as she guided Zoe toward the school gate.

I expected our guards to notice everything. That was their job. But none of them seemed to see him.

I watched until the car turned the corner and the gray coat disappeared behind the rain.

The ride home was usually silent. My father answered calls in clipped sentences and examined things on his tablet that made him frown. That afternoon, he put the tablet facedown.

“You're right,” he said finally.

I stared out at the city.

“I should have asked how you were feeling.”

“Mommy used to ask every day.”

“I remember.”

“She asked even when I was being grumpy.”

The leather seat creaked as he shifted toward me. “You were never very grumpy.”

“I was five. I was excellent at it.”

A sound escaped him. Not a laugh. More like the beginning of one that got lost.

He rubbed his face. “You are so much like her.”

I turned toward him. “Then why don't you like looking at me?”

His face changed. I saw a kind of hurt I had never known grown-ups could carry.

“Violet, I love looking at you.”

“You miss her when you do.”

He said nothing.

That was the awful part. I had guessed correctly.

We passed through the gates of our home while clouds gathered above the stone roof. Inside, the staff moved around us with the careful quiet they always used when Daddy came home. The house smelled of polished wood, cut lilies, and dinner being made by people who never knew whether anyone would eat it.

I ran upstairs before my father could say anything else.

Mommy's photograph sat on the table beside my bed. She had been laughing when the picture was taken. Daddy was behind the camera. I knew because she was looking straight at him with her whole face, as though the funniest person in the world stood just outside the frame.

I sat on my bed and tried to remember how her voice sounded when she said my full name, Violet Isabella Moretti, usually when I had put jam on the dog.

Then I pulled open the bottom drawer of my desk.

Twenty-seven cards were not the only cards I had made. There were six more hidden there, the ones I had been afraid to give him. On the last one, I had written, in my best careful printing: YOU CAN STILL BE HAPPY AND LOVE MOMMY.

I had never found the courage to deliver it.

A soft knock came at my door.

“Miss Violet?” It was Rosa, our housekeeper, who had been with our family longer than I had been alive. “Your father asked whether you'd like some cocoa.”

“Is he bringing it?”

A pause. “I could ask him to.”

“No, thank you.”

Rosa did not argue. She never did. She placed the cocoa outside my door anyway, and I heard her footsteps retreat down the hall.

I wanted to be angry with my father. Anger was easier than missing him when he was in the same house.

At seven o'clock, I heard something unusual. The front door opened, then closed, followed by a man's voice I didn't recognize. Our security chief, Luca Bellini, answered in a tone sharp enough to carry through the corridor.

“Not in front of the child.”

The other man said, “The photograph is already circulating.”

I slid off my bed and opened my bedroom door a crack.

They stood at the top of the main staircase. Luca was broad-shouldered and kind-eyed, with a silver scar near his eyebrow. The stranger facing him wore a dark overcoat and held a manila envelope. I recognized the shape of his gray coat before I recognized the face beneath it.

He had been standing outside my school.

My heart began to beat very fast.

“Who sent it?” Luca asked.

“The message came through an old account,” the man replied. “No return address.”

My father appeared below them, standing in the entrance to his study. “Bring it here.”

Luca took the envelope and walked downstairs. The man in the gray coat followed, but two guards stopped him at the landing. I watched my father open the envelope.

Inside was a glossy photograph.

I could see the picture even from above. Daddy, with his head tipped back and his mouth open in a laugh. Zoe stood in front of him, one hand lifted as though she were still delivering the punch line. Behind them, on the steps, I stood with my pink backpack and tears on my cheeks.

Someone had captured the exact moment my heart broke.

There was writing across the white bottom margin. My father read it without moving. Then he turned the photograph over.

“What does it say?” Luca asked.

My father stared at the words for so long that Luca asked again.

Finally, Daddy spoke. “It says, 'Even monsters have something left to lose.'”

Cold spread through me. I suddenly understood why grown-ups sometimes said they felt a room change temperature.

Luca reached for his phone. “We'll lock down the school tomorrow. I'll speak to the headmistress, get the camera logs, and—”

“No,” Daddy said. “Not until we know who took this. If you frighten the children, you give whoever did it exactly what they want.”

He looked down at the picture again.

“What about the cleaner's daughter?” Luca asked.

“Protection. Quietly. And her mother too.”

I swallowed. I had never heard my father offer protection to someone who had never asked him for it.

I must have made a noise, because his eyes snapped toward the stairs.

“Violet?”

I stepped out of the shadow. There was no point pretending.

“Is somebody going to hurt Zoe?” I asked.

“No one will touch her,” he said immediately.

“That's what you said about Mommy.”

The words fell into the marble foyer like a glass breaking.

My father's face went pale. Luca looked away.

I wanted to run upstairs. I also wanted Daddy to come after me. I stood there doing neither.

He began climbing the stairs. Slowly. When he reached me, he didn't try to hug me. He stopped one step below, giving me the choice.

“I made promises I couldn't keep,” he said. “I won't make one like that again. But I will do everything I can to keep you and Zoe safe.”

That was the first honest thing anyone had said about Mommy's death in years.

I stepped into his arms. He held me so tightly I could feel his heart beating through his coat.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered into my hair. “You should never have had to beg me to be your dad.”

I cried then. Loudly and without dignity. He stayed, even when his phone started ringing.

Later, after he tucked me in himself for the first time in three years, I heard another knock at the door.

Rosa came in holding a small folded piece of paper. “One of the school staff dropped this off for you,” she said. “She said it's from Zoe.”

Inside was a crayon drawing of two girls standing beneath a yellow sun. One had pink shoes. One had a blue backpack repaired with enormous gray patches. Between them, a large red heart floated over a crooked dog.

Below the picture, in letters Zoe's mother must have helped her write, were five words:

I DIDN'T STEAL YOUR DADDY.

My throat tightened. I was looking for a pencil to answer when I noticed something on the back.

Three little stick figures stood beside a black car. A fourth figure, drawn much taller, held a gray umbrella over them. An arrow pointed to the tall figure.

Next to it, in Zoe's shaky handwriting, was a name.

SILAS.

I knew that name.