"Get that child away from my table. I don't want him touching anything."
Gregory Hamilton said it loudly enough for people three tables away to turn their heads. Beneath the glowing strings of patio lights, his seven dinner companions stopped talking, their champagne glasses suspended above the white linen.
The man in the twelve-thousand-dollar wheelchair pointed at the small boy standing beside the railing, as though pointing at something the restaurant staff had forgotten to clean up. The boy was Black, barefoot, painfully thin, and wearing a torn jacket several sizes too large for his shoulders.
"He could steal something," Hamilton added, his voice growing harder as he noticed how many people were watching. "Or bring God knows what in here from the street."
The boy flinched, but he did not leave. His name was Miles Underwood, he was nine years old, and he had spent most of the past eight months learning how to make himself invisible. Tonight, however, invisibility was no longer an option, because Hamilton's left leg had seized into a frightening position and the wealthy man was breathing through clenched teeth. Miles looked past the expensive suit, the glittering watch, and the anger in Hamilton's face, toward the one thing nobody seemed able to explain.
"Sir," Miles whispered, "I think I know what might be happening to your leg."
A man at the table let out a startled laugh. Hamilton stared at the child for a long moment, then laughed too, sharply and without kindness. He opened his checkbook and slapped it against the table, making a silver spoon jump. "A million dollars, then," he said. "Fix me in those magical seconds you're talking about, and it's yours. Fail, and I'll have security call the police."
Miles swallowed. The whole patio seemed to be waiting for him to retreat, and he could hardly blame them for expecting it. His knees were shaking, his stomach had been empty for most of the day, and the hospital wristband in his pocket pressed against his fingers like a small piece of hard plastic. He thought of his mother saying, again and again, that something was terribly wrong, while people with clipboards walked past her chair.
"Okay," he said.
Half an hour earlier, before anyone knew his name, Miles had followed the smell of food along a service road outside Philadelphia. Garlic butter drifted from a restaurant kitchen, followed by the richer smell of grilled beef and fresh bread. October had begun turning the evenings cold, and fifty-two degrees felt much worse through bare feet and damp socks stuffed into his jacket pockets. He had once owned sneakers, gray ones with green laces, but a week of hard rain had finished what months of walking had started.