Chapter Thirty-Five

Sandra Bell called him the morning the story ran, before he’d even finished his first coffee, her voice unsteady in a way that told him she’d already read every word of it at least once by then. ‘You gave him his name back,’ she said. ‘Not just cleared of the charge — his actual name, in print, properly, the boy who carried spiders out in a cup rather than kill them, not just the deckhand they arrested. I didn’t think anyone was ever going to bother remembering that part of him alongside the rest.’