‘Those weren’t supposed to be thrown out,’ Harper said.

‘Neither were the people who made them.’

Harper looked back at Odessa. ‘Careful.’

‘No. You be careful. My granddaughter waited outside that building for two hours yesterday with a paper bird she made herself. Someone had taken down the sign with all their names. Do you know what it feels like when a child sees her own work in a dumpster?’

Harper remembered a different child crying in the same hallway, and the memory struck like a slap. She turned away.

‘I’m calling someone to clean this,’ she said. ‘You are going to pay for it.’

‘I will.’

‘And after that, stay off my property.’

Odessa nodded once, but she did not leave. ‘The performance is Saturday.’

‘There is no performance.’

‘There is a performance. Just not theirs.’

Harper faced her. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Go to the old icehouse at four. Ask what they are rehearsing. I won’t tell you what to believe. Look at the children who aren’t there.’

A gust of wind pushed the little cardboard sun toward the filter intake. Harper stepped around Odessa, collected the floating object with the pool net, and lifted it dripping from the water. The smiling face had been painted by Milo Santos, a quiet boy who insisted that all suns should have freckles.

On its reverse, someone had written in black marker: PROPERTY OF THE PRODUCTION.

Harper recognized neither the handwriting nor the claim. She turned the sun over again.

‘Who wrote this?’

Odessa watched her. ‘That’s the question I’ve been trying to get you to ask.’

At last the old woman folded the garbage bag and laid it beside her shoes. She stood still while Harper photographed the mess for the cleaning company. Then she picked up the bag and walked to the gate without trying to excuse herself.

‘Odessa,’ Harper called.

The woman paused.

‘I haven’t forgiven you for what you did.’

‘I didn’t come for forgiveness.’

‘What did you come for?’

‘I came because you are the only adult those children ever believed when you told them a stage could belong to them.’

She passed through the gate. Harper remained beside the pool, holding the ruined cardboard sun, until the little paper stars stopped spinning.

CHAPTER TWO: THE BUILDING WITH TWO DOORS

Bellweather Hall had once been a packing shed for apples. Its floorboards dipped toward the center, its radiators clicked in winter, and its windows rattled whenever a delivery truck passed. Harper loved it because nothing about it asked children to behave like miniature professionals.

The first afternoon she opened its doors, twelve children had arrived carrying notebooks and grocery sacks of scraps. Milo had brought cardboard from his mother’s restaurant. Odessa’s granddaughter, Nell, had brought colored tissue paper and a shoe box containing six wooden clothespins. A pair of brothers had assembled a dragon’s jaw from laundry baskets. By the end of the week, Harper had stopped assigning projects. The children were inventing them faster than she could keep up.