They sent my father home the next day, Sunday, two weeks after they’d arrested him. All charges were dropped, and there were even apologies, though they were technically unnecessary. Friends came in droves from the school to see him, everybody a bit shell-shocked to learn about Sam Leland but  most secretly pleased that it was he and not my father. The press came, and since it seemed likely to turn into a circus, Young John brought Jarod’s cotton candy maker, which he had ended up buying after all and giving to Dave. (Dave brought it out at the Marshalsea on occasion later, and cotton candy on the quad in the fall became a tradition after that.) Pastor Bert came and already seemed to be well acquainted with my father. How many times did he visit him? I wondered. I could see that we would probably be going back to the church where I had made a fool out of myself. I didn’t mind.

            The one person who was conspicuously absent was Jarod. No one seemed to notice. The press didn’t yet know what he’d done. My father certainly didn’t. The police were looking for him for a statement, but they weren’t at the party.

            After everyone had left and my father had gone to bed, very happy to be in his own bed again and looking forward to the prospect of good coffee in the morning, I left my house and walked to the Skarsgards’. It was empty of all Jarod’s things, all the Russian and English literature, all the PEZ refills and ice cream, the silver briefcase and little silvery recording discs. I wanted to cry, but then I remembered that he still had the key I’d given him to my father’s office. I walked to the school, found the front door of Clauser Hall propped open with a fat Bleak House, and brought the book up to my father’s office.

            Jarod was sitting there in the dark, watching one of his recordings. I came up behind him and watched it with him. He was a little boy, far littler than I’d seen him before, perhaps five years old, solemn-faced and dark-eyed, and there was Sydney once again pressing him to do a man’s work, ignoring his protests of fear. Anger rose in me against that man. But the little boy Jarod broke away, ran out of the room, pursued by tall men, struggling against them when they caught him. And Sydney took him from the men, spoke gently to him, and held him like a father should hold his child. Jarod’s fingers went out to the screen, touching Sydney’s strangely tender face.

            “That’s how I think of Sydney. That man there. He doesn’t want me to, but I can’t help it. That man is still inside him. I’ve been trying to find him ever since.”

            “Will you still care about Sydney when you find your family?”

            “Yes. Though maybe I won’t need him so much.” He closed the case and stood up.

            “You’re leaving now.”

            “Yes. It can’t end like Little Dorrit, you know.”

            “I never expected it to. Your beginning was like Arthur Clennam’s, but not your end. You’re much more than Arthur. You’re Smike and Oliver Twist and David Copperfield and Esther Summerson and Little Dorrit herself…all the children looking for someone to love them. And you’re Nicholas Nickleby and Mr. Pancks and Mr. Jarndyce and Nancy and Sydney Carton, the people who just can’t sit quietly and watch bad things happen to innocent people.”

            He said softly those poignant words of Sydney Carton: “I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous, and happy.”

            I couldn’t keep my tears back. “If you end up trading your life for someone else’s, escape before it comes to the guillotine, OK?”

            “I will. I promise, Kate.”

            He hugged me close, pressed his lips to the top of my head. I could almost feel him blinking back tears of his own.

            “Now go, Nicholas. Find some Smike to rescue. And someday, when all the Ralph Nicklebys and Mr. Casbys and Fagins and Squeers and Sikes and Mr. Polkinghorns and Sir Mulberry Hawks are defeated and there’s nothing more to fear, come back to the Marshalsea.”

            “I will, Little Dorrit. I will.”

            He was gone, and I sat down at my father’s desk and cried. Then I walked home to my father to begin our world again.