They appeared almost every Sunday, the two children from next door, moving slowly down the block with a single black garbage bag between them, picking up cans, wrappers, and bottles with a steadiness that never asked to be seen. From the window, the car, the front porch, their work looked like simple neighborhood conscientiousness, a weekly ritual of tidying the street. Their mother’s quick, complicated deflection when told she had wonderful kids hinted at something I couldn’t yet name, but did not explain it. It was only on a warm early-spring morning, when I watched the boy crouch at the base of my overgrown boxwood and carefully leave a small plastic-wrapped bundle—containing a folded note and a twenty-dollar bill—that the real shape of their Sunday routine began to revea… Continues…