" The bad things that happen to you don't have to mean anything at all. And anyway, he'll answer to God for what he did." She announced this with great certainty. For a girl with nothing to her name but a parakeet, to have such unwavering belief in the reckoning of evil in the world—a belief I could never bring myself to have, having seen, time and time again, depravity go unchecked—it awed me, and it was some time before I could bring myself to speak. "