Page 42 of Cruel Kiss

We come to a big window at the end of the hall. It looks out over the courtyard, the one behind the iron fence. More kids are playing out there, running around on the grass, the swing set, a sandbox. One of the orphanage workers, a young man, is kicking a ball back and forth with a knot of shrieking boys.

"That's new, too," Louisa says, tapping the glass. "The whole yard. Used to be a parking lot. Cracked concrete. It's much better this way, don't you agree?"

I look out. There's a little girl on the swings. She's got two dark braids and she's pumping her legs as hard as they'll go, higher and higher, head tipped back, laughing. Nobody's pushing her. She's doing it herself. And she's not looking around to see if anyone's watching, not measuring herself against anything, not making herself small. She's just a kid on a swing, going as high as she can, because she can.

I've seen a lot of things in the last month. I don't cry at most of them anymore.

This one might do me in, though.

"Louisa," Ronan says gently, "would you give us a moment?"

"Of course." She pats my arm. "Stay as long as you like, dear. The place is yours. Ha! Get it?"

Still laughing under her breath, she goes. Her footsteps fade down the hall. And then it's just me and Ronan in front of the window.

I don't say anything for a while. Neither does he.

"You built this," I finally infer.

"I pay for it," he corrects. "Louisa built it. She does the real work. I just sign the checks."

"She thinks you're a lawyer."

"I am a lawyer."

"You know what I mean." I turn to look at him. "She doesn't know."

"The whole story? No. Seemed unnecessary."

"Your name's not on it, though. I thought slappingAkovon everything was, like, your whole thing."

"Not this place."

"Then whose name—?" I stop.

Because I already know. I knew the second I read the sign, if I'm honest, but I didn't let myself put it together until right now.

Anna House.

"Your mother," I say.

Ronan looks out the window. "Anna," he says. "Yes."

In my mind's eye, I hear the sound of breaking glass. The sobs of a woman on her knees. Shrinking. Folding herself up and hiding herself away.

"I built it so that no child would ever have to see what I saw," Ronan explains in a rumble. "That's all. Nothing grander than that."

I look back out at the courtyard and the swinging girl. "The money," I say slowly. "The dirty money. It goes here?"

"Some of it. This place and a few others."

And there it is. The answer I came for.

I asked him, back in the kitchen, why he's letting his whole empire bleed out. Why would he turn off the thing that pays for everything? I thought there'd be some cold strategy behind it, some three-moves-ahead thing I couldn't see.

But it's not that.

"The point was making something clean out of something dirty," Ronan replies to my unvoiced question. "For a long time, I told myself that made it all worth it. All the bad shit I did, at least it had a purpose. I took the ugliest thing I came from and I turned it intothat." He nods at the girl on the swing. "Into a place where a child gets to be a child. That was the trade I made with myself."