In the cramped, noisy Philadelphia boardinghouse, Maria Vasquez dreamt of silence. Not the hush of a Sunday service or the muffled quiet after midnight, but the rolling, golden hush of open land, the kind she had only read about in penny novels and adventure tales.

She ached for a desk beside a window, the scratch of her pen and the rustle of her papers unchallenged by the city's clangor. What she had instead was a third-floor closet room above a bakery, the air forever scented with yeast and burnt sugar, and the footsteps of twenty other tenants tracking up and down the echoing stairs.

It wasn't a bad life, not compared to her childhood in the Hill District, but Maria wanted more. She wanted a home filled with laughter and the brambly tangle of children and cats. She wanted the sort of family that came from both luck and longing.

On a particularly gray Monday in late March, Maria was sent by her employer—the stern Mrs. Pritchard, who ran the Western Union office on Chestnut Street—to collect the morning's mail. She relished these errands, and not only because they got her out of the building and into the fresh air for a quarter hour.