Judith couldn’t sleep. After lying with her eyes open for a couple of hours, she decided to get some warm milk.

The house was so silent as she padded down the stairs. All she could hear, if she listened, was the faint chirp of crickets. She’d turned on the kitchen light and was trying to remember where Mother had put the Cocoa when she heard a noise in the backyard. A soft thump, as if something had hopped in over the fence. Then footsteps.

Someone in shoes was walking around the pool. That reassured her. If the footsteps had been soft and stealthy, she would have been frightened, but burglars did not wear hard soles, or walk about so casually.

She walked to the patio door and looked out.

She considered for a moment, then unlocked the french doors and stepped out.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered.

“I saw your light come on,” Leon said. “I need to tell you something. Something you need to know now.”

“All right.” She glanced nervously back at the house.

“I understand Cousin Lee is going to put up money for your tuition at Harvard.”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “I like Lee. She’s got what it takes.

“But Judy, you need to understand, that doesn’t make everything okay. Even if the Tesanges offer to pay for every single expense stateside, you’re not out of the woods yet.”

She couldn’t think of anything to say to this, so she waited.

“We are not Americans like other Americans. This island is not a state or even part of a state. It’s a territory.”

“If someone in DC who matters decides you can’t come to the mainland, you are not going to get to the mainland, or stay there, no matter how much money is in your bank account.”

For the second time that week, Judy felt as though the ground at her feet had vanished and she was falling.

“Now, I’m not saying it would absoluetely happen. Bill has friends in Washington, as well as enemies. It’s just that… Judy, tomorrow you and your mother are going to have a meeting with Mayor Abbot in her office.”

“It’s a meeting your father doesn’t know about and mustn’t know about. Kristal Abbot is going to offer some options. And you are going to need to consider them very, very carefully.”

“They won’t let me go stateside? They would do that?”

“It’s a possibility. You must remember what’s at stake. It’s your future. And some gestures… Jude, I like Bill very much. I like Artiste, and I love my aunt. I respect all of them.”

“But they are at the end of their lives. You have decades ahead of you, and you’re a brilliant woman, with an opportunity that won’t happen twice in a lifetime.”

He glanced over her shoulder at the house.

“Before you take some meaningless stand that does nothing more than make other people feel better — or you feel better at that moment — think about what you could do with a Harvard education. Think about the lives you could save as a Harvard-educated doctor, or researcher.”

“Weigh that in the balance. Please.”

He squeezed her hand, and she noticed his palms were oddly scratchy, as if they were calloused. “You don’t need to say anything right now,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure you understand. What you do must be your decision. YOURS. Please remember that.”

“I will,” she whispered.

He turned away and almost literally disappeared into the shadows. She heard again a sound as if something were going quickly, lithely over the fence.

Then she was alone.

None of what had just happened made sense to her. Had she just had a dream? Was she sleepwalking?

She went back inside and started to climb the stairs up to her room.

All her life she had been certain, not just of her own intelligence, but of her own goodness.

She stepped onto the landing of the second floor.

Being moral had never been hard for her. She was someone who felt other people’s pain, who cared.

Why, then, had she stopped in the hallway? Why was she looking up at the little trap door that led to the attic?

For the first time she realized that being good had been easy because she’d never really had to pay a price for it. She had well-off and caring parents, a big house, good food, good friends.

She wanted to make a difference. She could make a difference, a real one. But she had to have the chance.

Judith reached up and pulled on the cord that opened the door. It creaked slightly, and she winced, froze. Then she pulled down the ladder. It made almost no sound. She climbed up into the little rectangle of darkness.

It was not a big attic. Judy had to keep her back bent, and the smell of raw wood and insulation was at first almost suffocating. Once she’d turned on the little overhead light, it wasn’t hard at all to find the boxes of stuff from Dad’s office. It was probably the most recent thing carried up.

Letters, meeting agendas, files. She leafed through them, glancing, then setting them aside.

It took only a minute to find the notebook Dad had mentioned, and less than that to find the entries that had worried him.

Very carefully, she pulled out a page near the back.

Her eyes scanned the entries. Yes, the comment about the cop with seven kids was probably about Ambrose Patch. And Mr. Ajax, who worked at the port and had tried to organize a union, was mentioned by name. And there was Mrs. Bread, who’d taught Judith in third grade, and a reference to someone who could only be Mr. Trumble at the public library.

She folded the page in half and slipped it into the pocket of her robe.

Light out. Climb silently down the ladder, her heart pounding, half expecting to turn and see Elisha, or Mother, or Bill waiting for her in the upstairs hall.

Nobody was there.As silently as she could, pushed up the ladder and closed the door. She turned out the hall light.

She went into her room.

Now she could sleep. It was settled. Not done, perhaps, but settled, and she need think no more about it. The black drowsiness rose around her, and her eyes became heavy, even as she felt that tiny spark of protest in her mind, the same thought that had begun the minute she raised her hand to pull open the attic door. It kept turning over and over in her head like a squirrel in a wheel.

She’d thought she was a good person.