"Nice to meet you, Sophie Blackwood. Are you waiting for your dad? Or your mom?"

Something changed in Sophie's face. The sharp, amused mask didn't drop, but it stiffened, the way a surface freezes when the temperature drops a single degree.

"My mother left when I was a baby. She never came back," Sophie said. Her voice didn't waver. She said it the way she might have said my mother is in the next room -- flatly, as a statement of fact. But her hand, resting on the book beside her, pressed down harder against the cover.

Grace felt the anger drain out of her, replaced by something softer. "I'm sorry, Sophie. I shouldn't have --"

"Don't," Sophie said, and her voice was sharp again, sharper than before. "Don't make that face. I don't want your pity. You look pathetic enough already without adding pity face to the list."

Grace's mouth opened, then closed. The softness in her chest didn't disappear, but the anger came back alongside it, and the two feelings sat together uncomfortably, like strangers on a subway bench.

"You're pretty rude for a kid," Grace said.

"You're pretty plain for an adult." Sophie picked up Le Petit Prince, looked at it for a moment, then -- with calm, deliberate intent -- took the book in both hands, gripped the spine, and tore it in half.

The sound was terrible. The old binding cracked and split, pages separating with a ripping sound that seemed too loud for the quiet room. Gold-edged pages fluttered. Sophie dropped the two halves on the floor at Grace's feet and looked up at her with an expression of pure, cold challenge.

"Oops," she said.

Grace stared at the destroyed book. The cover had split along the spine, revealing layers of old glue and cloth binding. Torn illustrations lay scattered on the cream carpet -- the little prince on his asteroid, the rose under glass, the fox in the wheat field. A first edition. Worth God knew how much. Destroyed in two seconds with the casual cruelty that only a child could manage.

"Why did you do that?" Grace asked. Her voice was quiet.

"Because I wanted to."

"That was a beautiful book."

"It was my book. I can do what I want with it."

Grace looked at the torn pages on the floor, then back at Sophie. The girl sat with her chin lifted, her gray eyes bright and hard, her small body vibrating with an energy Grace recognized. Not malice. Not really. Something more desperate than that. Something that looked like malice because it was easier than looking like what it actually was.

Grace had taught at her parents' preschool in Brooklyn for six years, from the time she was sixteen through her years at Brooklyn College. She'd seen every kind of kid there was. The shy ones who cried at drop-off. The wild ones who bit. The sweet ones who shared their snacks. And the ones like Sophie -- the hard ones, the ones who pushed and tested and provoked because they needed to know where the walls were. Because no one had shown them.

"Pick it up," Grace said.

Sophie blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Pick up the book. The pieces. Pick them up and put them on the table."

"No."

"Sophie."

"No. Make me."

The words hung in the air between them. Sophie's chin was still lifted, her jaw set, her small hands gripping the edge of the sofa cushion. She was daring Grace to do something. Begging her to do something. Every line of her small body was an invitation and a challenge.

Grace looked at this seven-year-old girl in her pressed navy dress and her polished shoes, sitting alone in an executive lounge on the thirty-eighth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper while her father did whatever fathers who could afford first editions of Le Petit Prince did on a Tuesday afternoon. She looked at the torn book on the floor. She thought about the nannies who had almost certainly come before her, the ones who had picked up the pieces and cleaned up the messes and smiled through the insults because the paycheck was good and the child was someone important's daughter.

"All right," Grace said.

She stood up. She walked over to Sophie's sofa. Sophie watched her come with wide eyes -- still defiant, but with something flickering behind the defiance. Fear, maybe. Or hope. They looked similar, on a child's face.