The apartment was small. That was the first thing you noticed about it. Small and cold and smelling faintly of boiled cabbage and damp drywall, the way all apartments in this building smelled regardless of who lived there or how long they had lived there.

Jake Donovan noticed it every morning when he woke up. Not because it was new or surprising. He had lived here for two years. But he noticed it the way you notice the weather: not because it changes, but because it is always there, whether you pay attention or not.

Sue was already up. She always was. Seven years old and up before the alarm, sitting at the table with her homework spread out in front of her, her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth in the concentrated way that seven-year-olds do when they are trying to make the letters on the page behave.

Jake stood in the doorway and watched her for a moment. The kitchen light was fluorescent and flickering, the way it had been flickering for three months and the landlord had not fixed because fixing cost money and the landlord did not spend money on things that did not make him money.

She was wearing a sweater that was too big. It had belonged to someone else's daughter, the way everything in this apartment had belonged to someone else. The sweater was pink and it went past her hands and covered half her fingers and she did not seem to mind.

"Morning," Jake said.

"Morning," Sue said, without looking up. "I got a B on my spelling."

"That's good."

"I think I can get an A next time."

"You will."

He made coffee. The coffee was instant and it was the best they had and he drank it standing over the sink because there was only one cup and it belonged to Sue and she needed it more than he did even though he was the one who worked and she was the one who went to school and the math did not add up to anything that made sense but he drank it anyway because coffee was coffee and hot was hot and for a moment it was warm in his hands and that was enough.

He had come here from Appalachia two years ago. Two years since the collapse. Two years since he had crawled out of a mine shaft with coal dust in his lungs and blood on his knees and the weight of seventy dead men on his back.

Seventy. He had seen the number in the report. Seventy miners trapped. Seventy miners who did not make it. He had been one of the two who did. The other one was a man named Harris who had been five feet from him when the roof came down and who had reached out a hand and Jake had reached back and their hands had touched for exactly three seconds before the darkness took them both and Harris did not wake up and Jake did.

Two out of seventy. The odds were not in your favor when you crawled out of a pile of dead bodies and lived.

He had told himself it was luck. It wasn't. It was something else. Something he couldn't name and didn't want to think about because thinking about it meant thinking about Harris and thinking about Harris meant thinking about the seventy and thinking about the seventy meant standing in the mine shaft with his hand reaching into the dark for a man who was already dead and would stay dead no matter how long he held on.

After the collapse, he had stayed in the town. There was nowhere else to go. His family was there. His father was there. A retired miner with hands like leather and a cough like grinding stones and a mind that was sharper than any man twice his age.

His father had spent the last ten years of his life writing reports. Safety reports. Things the company didn't want written and didn't want read and definitely didn't want published. Faulty supports in Shaft Three. Inadequate ventilation in Shaft Seven. Pressure readings that should have triggered an evacuation and didn't because the company's representative had signed off on them because signing off made things easier and easier made money and money made everything else possible.

His father had written all of it down. Page after page after page. Dates and times and names and numbers. The kind of report that could shut a mine down if it was taken seriously.

The company did not take things like that seriously.

Jake knew what had happened to his father. He had known it the day the layoff notice came—not a layoff, really, because his father was already retired, but something that looked like a layoff if you squinted and didn't ask too many questions. He had known it the week after that, when his father stopped coming home from his walks and started coming home with bruises that he said were from falling down the stairs and Jake knew his father had never fallen down the stairs in sixty-two years of living.

He had known it the morning he found his father in the garage with a bottle of pills and a note that said I can't do this anymore and Jake understood everything.

His father had been killed. Not with a gun or a knife or anything that would have left evidence the company could deny. He had been killed the way the company killed: slowly, through pressure and isolation and the systematic removal of everything that made life worth living, until the man who had once been sharper than any man twice his age had simply stopped and taken a handful of pills and let the darkness take him too.

Seventy-one dead. Not in the collapse. In the aftermath.

Jake had left the next day. He had taken Sue with him—Sue, who had lost both parents in the collapse, who had no relatives who wanted her, who had appeared at his door one evening with a backpack and a face that was all angles and eyes and nothing else, and he had let her in because letting her in was the only thing he knew how to do anymore.

They had driven to the city in his truck, a rusted thing that sounded like it was dying every time he turned the key, and they had arrived in a world that was nothing like the town they had left. The city was loud and fast and indifferent. It did not care about seventy-one dead miners. It did not care about a boy who had crawled out of a mine and a girl who had lost her parents. It did not care about anything except itself, and that was fine by Jake because indifference was something he understood.

He found work. Minimum wage. A warehouse on the south side of the city, stacking boxes that belonged to people who would never know his name and would never care. Eight hours a day, five days a week, twenty-eight dollars an hour before taxes that took more than they should have and left him with enough for rent and food and Sue's school supplies and nothing else.

Sue went to school. She was good at it. Better than good. She sat at the table every night with her homework and her too-big pink sweater and her tongue poking out of her mouth and she learned things and she brought them home and she showed him and he looked at the pages and he nodded and he said good and that was all she needed because good was enough.

One evening she came home with a piece of paper and held it out to him without saying anything.

He took it. It was a drawing. Crayon on construction paper, the kind of paper that was thick and rough and good for crayons. The drawing showed three figures. They were holding hands. One was tall and thin. One was short and small. One was in between.

They were standing in front of a house that was a rectangle with a triangle on top and a square door and a square window and smoke coming out of a rectangle on top that was probably a chimney.

The sky was blue. The sun was yellow and it had lines coming out of it like a star.

At the bottom, in letters that were careful and deliberate and still a little wobbly, Sue had written: OUR FAMILY.

Jake held the drawing for a long time. He looked at Sue. She was watching him with her wide, dark eyes, waiting for his reaction the way she always waited for his reaction to things, with a caution that was too old for seven and not old enough to be armor.

He took the drawing. He walked to the wall of the apartment—the bare drywall that had nothing on it because they had nothing to hang—and he used a piece of tape to attach the drawing to the wall at eye level.

"Alright," he said.

Sue smiled. It was a small smile. It didn't reach her eyes exactly, but it was close. It was the kind of smile that had survived a collapse and a loss and a journey and a city and a too-big pink sweater and a flickering fluorescent light and a table with one cup and a boy who worked in a warehouse stacking boxes that didn't matter.

It was a smile that had survived all of that and was still there, small and fragile and stubborn as hell.

Jake sat down at the table and drank his coffee and looked at the drawing on the wall and thought about his father and thought about Harris and thought about the seventy and the seventy-first and he thought about the reports his father had written and the pills his father had taken and the garage and the note and the darkness.

He thought about all of it and then he stopped thinking about it because thinking about it didn't change anything and the coffee was getting cold and Sue had homework to do and tomorrow he had work and the warehouse didn't stack itself and the city didn't care and none of this was fair and none of it was heroic and none of it was a story with a beginning and a middle and an end.

It was just life. Just waking up and working and coming home and watching a seven-year-old girl do her homework in a small cold apartment that smelled like boiled cabbage and damp drywall and trying to keep her safe in a world that had already taken everything from her once and was probably going to try again.

He looked at the drawing one more time. Three people holding hands. A house with smoke coming out of the chimney. A blue sky with a yellow sun.

Our family.

He picked up his coffee. It was cold. He drank it anyway.