Cairo woke, too. He did not know names for strangers anymore. He knew only the old codes: loud sounds meant danger; hands that moved quick meant fire. His chest slammed against his ribs. He hugged the can like it was a shield and tried to tuck himself into the corner where shadows kept promises.

“Hey.” Alani’s voice was gentle, like a moth. “Hi. I’m Alani. Do you… want some bread?”

Cairo blinked. He had not seen bread in a long time that did not smell of someone else’s hands. He reached for the can first, then inched toward the offered piece of bread. He bit it like it might disappear; he smelled it as if trying to recognize whether kindness had a flavor.

“Don’t move too fast,” Nora murmured, and she sank to the floor so her legs did not look as tall as mountains.

They did everything slowly. Malik laid a blanket near the doorway and set out a cup of water. Nora kept her voice soft and said nothing of police or papers. Alani stayed by the window, as if her very presence could be a promise.

Hours crept like cautious animals. The boy watched. Sometimes he stared straight through them, as if reading an old photograph. Sometimes he watched their hands, learning new ways to hold cups and carry bowls. When night fell, Nora set a small cot on the floor beside Alani’s bed, and they told the boy he could sleep there for a night. “Just tonight,” they said, as if there were rules whose edges could be softened.

He placed his can beside the pillow. He touched Alani’s hand as though testing whether the world would stay. Her fingers rested on his palm a moment and then stayed.

“What’s your name?” Nora asked finally.

The boy’s mouth pressed thin. Words were like stones he did not trust. “Cai…ro,” he said at last, a name that unfurled like a small flag.

“Cairo,” Nora repeated, feeling it anchor. “You’re safe. We’ll keep you safe.”

That night Cairo slept with his face unburied for the first time in a long while. He did not wake at every creak. When a storm brushed the eaves, he did not shove the blanket tighter around his ears. Morning found him still there — alive, breathing, a small miracle that had not been official yet.

Over the next days Nora and Malik did the things good people must when they encounter brokenness: they fed Cairo warm food that tasted like other people’s kitchens, found a pediatric clinic whose nurse smiled like sunlight, and made the phone calls they were supposed to make. They told the story gently, leaving out the parts that made the boy flinch and including the parts that made him sit up straighter.

Alani became a practiced thief of comforts for him. She smuggled him small things: a red crayon this afternoon, a patchwork sock the next. She taught him how to tie a shoelace with exaggerated patience, so he could watch her hands and learn trust.

“What do you miss?” Alani asked during one of their long afternoons under the sycamore tree.

Cairo chewed the stem of a grass blade and thought. “Mom’s singing,” he said finally. “She used to sing about stars.”

Nora, who had learned the wrongness of telling children everything at once, sat beside them and hummed the tune she could not recall the words to. Cairo’s face softened, memory blooming like a tiny light.

Weeks passed. The authorities visited. A gentle-faced social worker named Esther sat on the edge of Nora’s couch and asked Cairo his favorite color and whether he liked dogs. Cairo answered in notes at first, then in words. Papers were signed. The legal wheels turned with an ache of bureaucracy and the warm impatience of people who wanted to make things right.

Malik and Nora opened their home for longer than a night. Foster care arrangements were discussed and approved. Alani gave Cairo a fort made of blankets and popcorned laughter. She taught him to skip stones on the little pond in the municipal park, showed him how to find shapes in cloudbanks, and — when Cairo’s hands grew bold enough — how to draw a cat that sometimes looked like a tiger.

Cairo learned that other people could come and leave and that some people stayed. He learned that when Nora frowned it was usually because she was solving a problem that liked to disguise itself as small; he learned that Malik kept his hands busy so his thumbs would not worry; and he learned, slowly and with the tenderness of someone stitching up a hole, to put the can into a box in the attic where he would look at it sometimes and not every night.

One evening, months from the damp night the sky took the house, the three of them — Nora, Malik, Alani — and one smaller boy who folded himself around the shape of a new life, went back to the broken house. The wind was kinder now; the lot had been cleared. The shell that had scared so many had been burned out and finally made quiet.

Alani found the footprint she had first seen, faint in the damp soil, as if the earth remembered the day a small pair of feet first stumbled into other people’s stories. Cairo stepped into the doorway last. He paused, looked at the empty room that had been his world and then his prison, and touched the threshold like a child blessing a memory.

“Do you want to go inside?” Nora asked.

Cairo closed his eyes. He thought of his mother’s hands, of a fire’s crack, of the rain tasting of ash. He remembered his father’s voice trying to hold the ceiling like it was soft. He had been a child in a house that had no people left, and he had become a child with new people. He opened his eyes and shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Not today.”

They walked home together. Alani skipped ahead and came back to take his hand. Malik carried a blanket over his shoulder, and Nora hummed the star song in a voice that had been practiced in kitchens and hospital corridors and the soft, inexorable work of bringing safety.

That night, before bed, Alani tucked a small paper star under Cairo’s pillow. “So the stars have somewhere to sleep too,” she announced.

Cairo smiled the small, careful smile of someone who had put a wound in a safe place. He pressed his fingers to the paper and thought of his mother singing about stars. The sound in his chest was quieter now, not empty but full of new sorts of light.

He still sometimes woke and looked for his can. It sat on a high shelf in their kitchen — dented and dusty, a relic and a talisman both. When he touched it, he did not clutch it as if it would leave. He had learned how to ask for a hug. He had learned the confusing geometry of trust: you bend, and sometimes others bend back.

In the years that followed, Mulberry Lane’s new house grew a garden that a boy once called his shrine. They taught Cairo how to plant seeds and how to forgive himself softly for the things he could not have stopped. He went to school and learned the shape of letters. He learned that names could be anchors instead of ropes.

One night, much later, when the sycamore tree had shed a handful of its leaves and the house at the end of the lane had a new foundation and was no longer only a rumor, Cairo sat with Nora and Malik on the porch. He held Alani’s hand; she had grown into someone who still listened to small sounds. He watched the lane the way children watch for kite strings — hopeful for the tug.

“Do you ever wish they’d come back?” Alani asked suddenly.

Cairo looked up at the stars. For a moment, the boy who had held a can and the boy who had learned to sleep in a bed overlapped like light through glass.

“Sometimes,” he said. “But then I remember tonight. And that’s enough.”

Nora pressed a warm cup into his palms. Malik draped an arm around both of them. The world continued making noises — some loud, some kind — and Cairo no longer flinched at each one. He had learned the shape of being found.

Outside, the wind went on as it always did, moving through eaves and making honest sounds. Inside, a small boy named Cairo, who had lived alone in a house full of ghosts, was learning the slow art of belonging.