She’s told it differently in her diary. She can’t tell the truth, so shameful. This time she doesn’t choose her words carefully, nor does she endeavor to improve her handwriting as she normally does. She writes fast, in a hurry, feeling relieved as she fills the page but very bad when she finishes and rereads what she’s written. The words are contradictory, they’re full of lies like sharp edges, they wound so.

Old Man returns on the fourth day like this: weepy, trembling, begging. Never, absolutely never, can she repeat what she did the other day. Soon, swear you won’t do it ever again. And she swears, raises her right hand, closes her eyes, she promises, she promises.

Old Man, you have to forgive me, she says, and he—who doesn’t shout today, today he only whispers—tells her that in a different park he found a lost Agapornis, very sad, very disoriented, and he bought some seeds that, with a lot of patience, he got it to eat. She understands that this is his way of forgiving her: talking about his birds, as if nothing bad had happened.

She would like to do the same, to go on just like that, but in her situation going on means failing, her position isn’t the same as Old Man’s. There’s very little time left before the meeting with the educational inspectorate—or social services, Soon still doesn’t know—just a few days, she can count them on one hand, and she’s afraid that even before the meeting, at any moment, the police will show up at her house again and shame her parents definitively. This is what she most fears: shaming her parents. Nothing she has done was done against them. She doesn’t care about disappointing them—she’s already disappointed them many times—but she doesn’t want to hurt them. She imagines the two cops looking at each other, confounded, murmuring: how is it possible that this girl has skipped school almost three months and they, her parents, have been so oblivious?

Old Man has a wound on his hand, a deep cut that looks infected. He’s put a bandage on it that doesn’t cover as much as it should; the skin, swollen and bruised, bares itself brazenly around it. The bandage is dirty and ragged. But Soon is not going to ask him what happened. And not just out of deference. Maybe she doesn’t want to know. Maybe it’s better to act like him, to talk about nothing but birds.

We could go live together, she says without thinking. Where?, he asks. She likes that he doesn’t question the statement itself—about living together—but rather the practical aspects: where, how, when. She doesn’t know where, but far away—or maybe not that far, she says, not so far that she couldn’t visit her parents every once in a while. Old Man sits thinking: they could live on a lake, or a pond, so they could observe the cycles of birds, the courting, the nesting, the migrations. Would she like that? Soon gets excited, nods. Maybe it would be easier if they got married, she says, because if they don’t get married people could come looking for her and take her away from there—from the lake or wherever—by force. They might think Old Man has kidnapped her or seduced her by pouring a potion into her drink, like in fairy tales. If they get married, though, it won’t be so easy to separate them, there’ll be papers joining them, it’ll take lawyers or judges or whatever to invalidate those papers, and that will take a long time, very long, and meanwhile Soon will have birthdays and she’ll come of age.