what was your job, Livy?” He moved closer, green eyes flashing. “Maybe it’s time you told me the truth about yourself. You weren’t just a poor little street kid Mrs. Brooks took in, were you?”
“You’re right. I wasn’t. Before Mrs. Brooks saved my life, I was one of the best lock pickers in Chicago.”
“Not to mention an ace pickpocket too, right?”
Livy nodded. Might as well have it all out in the open. He was bound to find out sooner or later. Maybe if he knew the whole truth, he’d stop looking at her in a way that made her think about becoming a wife and a mother to little dark-haired babies who looked just like Andy.
He speared her with a suspicious look. “That first day I met you. Those boys did steal my watch, didn’t they?”
Livy raised her chin. “Yes. And I put it back, and you were none the wiser.”
His disgusted look twisted in her heart like one of the wires she used to pick locks. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him, but she couldn’t change her past, no matter how much she wanted to. “I’m sorry. I never meant to mislead you or anyone else. My past is behind me.”
He took a step toward her. “Is it, Livy? Is it really?”
Livy looked away, unable to bear the censure in his eyes any longer. “I know you don’t believe me, but Mrs. Brooks didn’t just save my life when she took me in. She led me to Jesus Christ and taught me that what I was doing was wrong.”
“How do you justify what you did all those years?”
The hot sting of tears gathered in her eyes. He still didn’t understand how children abandoned on the streets suffered, not even after seeing Bobby at death’s door, and then hearing that same child struggle with identifying the men who’d almost killed him.
“I didn’t know any better. All I knew was that I was freezing, my stomach was empty, and my sister had bled to death in a filthy alley right before my eyes, taking her babe with her. I wanted to eat, to live. That’s all that mattered.” She wanted to shake him. He knew nothing—nothing—about what she’d been through. She jabbed at his chest, unable to check the tears squeezing out the corners of her eyes. “Don’t talk to me about justifying my actions until you’ve walked barefoot through the snow or fought the dogs for bones to throw in a pot to have a little something to eat.”
When she stopped, the only sound was her harsh breathing filling the room. Jake stared at her, suffocating her with his silence. Was he repulsed by what she’d told him? It didn’t matter what he thought anymore. All that mattered was saving the children on the streets of Chestnut and in the hands of that monster Gibbons.
If telling the truth about her past opened people’s eyes to the plight of these kids, then she’d tell the world.
Jake turned away, gripping the window seal until his knuckles turned white. “Was it that bad?”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then opened her eyes again. “It was worse—much worse. I . . . I don’t have words to describe it.”
He glanced at her, a hint of compassion now in his gaze. “Can you give me another chance? I promise to listen to you, to Luke, and to the others this time.”
She pushed the memories to the back of her mind and swiped at the tears on her cheeks. “I’ll give you another chance on one condition.”
“What?”
“That you take me with you to the glove factory.”
* * *
“Would you hurry up already?”
Livy shot Jake a look filled with daggers, and he clamped his lips together. She pressed her ear against the lock, a long, thin wire in her hand. The temperature, already below freezing, kept dropping. It seemed like they’d crouched in the shadows for hours, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes.
A click later, Livy threw a triumphant look in his direction. The lock popped open, and they slipped inside the darkened building. Once the door shut behind them, Jake lit a lantern and pulled the shutters low so that only a sliver of light illuminated the room. The light revealed an office, small and cluttered, with barred windows set high in the walls.
Livy hurried to a desk in the corner and pulled out a drawer. “I tried to get a job here not long after Mrs. Brooks and