Elena Marie Rossi arrived on a suffocating August night, born onto a stained mattress in a South Boston walk-up that smelled of stale beer and wasted chances. Her mother, Maria, labored with nothing but a bottle of whiskey and the help of a neighbor whose hands had caught a half-dozen bastards in that same room. Maria named the baby Elena because it sounded like something finer than the life she had, the kind of name that belonged to women who wore real pearls. The father was a longshoreman who had bent Maria over a stack of crates behind a bar, spent himself inside her with an animal grunt, and vanished. When the test showed two pink lines, Maria only lit a cigarette and murmured to her belly, "Be pretty. Pretty pays."