We grew thinner. Even with our pickings, our petticoats slipped from our waists and our bodices started to sag. We couldn’t pay the cook anymore so he left, cursing us. “You’re a bunch of stinking, brainless thieves!” he snapped.

“We are not brainless,” Maman snapped back.

She sold the widow’s necklace and her own pearl earrings and my white fur muff. She nearly sold the bone-handled knife but Papa stopped her. “Sell it?” He shook his head. “But it’s so sharp, and it’s pocket-sized … I reckon I’ve got use for that.”

*  *  *

Only one person didn’t grow thinner that autumn and that was Maman. She actually grew fatter, sucking the marrow out of bones and licking the stones of fruit, and she was bad-tempered too.

One day she slapped Cosette so hard that Cosette struck the doorframe as she fell. “Have you killed her?” I whispered, frightened.

“Of course I haven’t killed her … What a stupid question!” But Cosette’s nose bled and bled.

Then one night Maman stopped on the stairs. She groaned, felt her belly with her hands. “It’s coming.”

“What is?” asked Azelma.

“The baby,” said Maman. “My God, this thing had better be a girl … ,” she muttered to herself.

It wasn’t. It was a boy. We knew he’d been born from the sound of our mother’s wild screeching in the middle of the night.

“A boy? A BOY?! What the hell do I want with a wretched boy?!”

I hurried downstairs to find my little brother lying on the floor, waving his fists as he wailed and wailed.

Maman was hunched by the fire. She was sweaty and red and drinking gin. “A boy!” she spat out like a seed.

“We can’t leave him on the floor,” I whispered.

“Yes, we can.” Maman stood up. “I’m going to bed.”

“But he’s hungry, Maman! And he’s so little …”

“He’s a boy, Eponine. I didn’t want one of them.”

I didn’t understand her so I said, “Papa? Are you there? What shall we do with the baby?”

He came out of the shadows and shrugged. “I reckon we leave him. One less mouth to feed.”

As for Azelma, she was seven years old and as hard as a fist. “A boy? I agree—I don’t like boys.”

With that, they all went upstairs, leaving the baby and me.

“Poor, poor baby …” I lifted him. He was smaller than our cat and smaller than the rabbits that used to hang on hooks. I rocked him a little. I said, “Don’t cry, little man.” But he wouldn’t soothe.

Then I saw her.

Cosette stepped out of the darkness, as pale as a ghost. “He needs milk,” she whispered. “And to be warm.”

I thought of being cruel, of saying, And what would you know? You’re stupid and ugly … But I didn’t want to. The baby was so tiny and helpless, and I didn’t know how to help him. “Milk? Here, will you take him?” I passed him to Cosette. “I’ll look in the cellar.”

That’s where we kept milk because it was so cold. I felt in the darkness. There was one pail of milk and I filled a cup from it.

Cosette was singing, under her breath, when I came back up.

“I have milk.”

“How cold is it? Maybe we should warm it—until it’s as warm as a person is?”

So we placed it in the embers of the fire, for a while. We sat with the baby, singing to him. Cosette had a voice like a songbird—a thrush or a lark.

“Why doesn’t Madame Thenardier want him?” she asked. “Why did she want a girl, not a boy?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. But she’s always hated boys. I know she had two brothers and they used to beat her. Her father beat her too.”

Cosette sniffed. “That makes me sad.”

“It does?” She was sorry for Maman? The little prisoner felt sorry for the big prison guard? In the fire’s glow, Cosette looked very pretty.

We fed him together. We dipped our fingers in the warm milk and popped our fingers in the baby’s mouth and he sucked like a fish—suck-suck. He kept moving his arms too, and I wondered if he might be a fighter when he was older—a strong little man.

Upstairs, we found a crib. Because Maman had hoped for a girl she’d put a lace-edged blanket on it. We tucked him under this laciness and put kisses on his forehead, and Cosette padded down to her own bed.

We didn’t talk about it again. In the morning, Azelma yawned and asked if there was any bread to eat; Cosette was told to mop the floor where the baby had been born—“and do it properly! Understand?”

Nobody mentioned him. He only survived in those first few months because we chose to help him—Cosette and me. When nobody was looking, we dipped our fingers into milk. We took turns to wash him and made sure he was warm.

After a few weeks, Maman looked up from her latest romance novel. The baby was crying and the noise was annoying her. “Have we named him?” she asked.

Papa said, “Who?”

In her book, there was a character called Gavroche. “That’ll do,” she said.

So when I went up to see my brother that night I tickled his belly and whispered, “Hello, little Gavroche.”