His eyes traveled up and down the façade of what Maddy used to call “that big, sharp church,” resting on the rose window set deep between the towers. “I guess,” he said at last, “it was something she had to do on her own.”

I kept my silence, willing the animals to be gone. I could not bear so much soft, creaturely life in one place. No water could wash that away.

Eventually my father said: “She didn’t tell you?”

“Obviously she didn’t tell me! Did Mom know?”

“Of course not. If I’d told your mother, I’d have told you.”

“It was just between you and Maddy.”

He nodded. “She never showed me the letters. As things got worse, it wasn’t exactly at the front of my mind.”

A clergywoman approached; her smile faltered when she caught sight of our faces. That was when my father tried his one-armed sideways hug on me. The woman took it as her cue to flick her holy water on Barney, and as she did so, I slipped out of my father’s embrace and stood apart on my own patch of sunlit stone. I was not beholden to my parents anymore. I no longer had to bide my time or hold my tongue because I needed them for Maddy.

“Shall we go?”

My father plunged his hands in his pockets and bounced his change. “What was he like? Was he kind to her?”

“Kind enough.”

“Oh good! It meant a lot to Maddy, the idea of Antonio. I warned her he might not want anything to do with her. She was very determined. She was annoyed because I never told her I met him, way back when.”

“Well, Maddy was nothing if not determined. We all know that.”

Still my father did not move. “So,” he ventured, “it was a good thing she found him?”

“How would I know!”

He blinked at me in surprise. His eyes were wet.

“Probably,” I rushed to say. “Probably it was.”

When I stayed home from school as a child, I waited all day long for my father’s step in the hallway. Until he spoke to me and laid his hand on my forehead, my malaise was not wholly real or authorized.

I took his arm and scolded him. “You should have told me!”

He did not yield to my touch or my lighter tone. “Don’t you think,” he said at last, “it was up to Maddy to tell you?”

Outside the Metro, I handed my father the leash. I was taking the train north to Takoma Park.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right, Dad? Want me to come with you?”