"What's your name?" Nathaniel asked gently, settling more fully onto the marble floor beside her, indifferent for once to what his tailored suit might suffer from the contact.
"Clara," she said softly, her voice small and cautious, still watching him carefully, as though gauging whether trust was safe to extend.
"Clara," he repeated. "Are you here alone?"
She shook her head slightly. "My brother's outside. He said to wait here, that nobody would notice if I just sat quiet by the tree." She looked down at the remaining scrap of bread in her hands. "We found this in the kitchen door. Nobody saw us take it."
Nathaniel felt something in his chest crack open at the simple, matter-of-fact honesty of her explanation — not shame at being caught, not embarrassment, just the plain practical logic of a child who'd learned exactly how invisible she and her brother had become to the world around them.
"Why were you so hungry, Clara?" he asked, though some part of him already suspected he wouldn't like the answer.
She looked up at him then, eyes filling with fresh tears that cut clean tracks through the soot on her face. "We were hungry," she said simply, her voice trembling now. "We haven't eaten since yesterday. Our mom's been sick, and there wasn't enough for all three of us, so me and my brother said we weren't hungry so she could eat instead. But we were. We really were."