Beyond the koi pond was the outer terrace, which was larger than my first apartment when I was fourteen and living on my own in Houston’s Fifth Ward. It, the patio, was paved with blue and red tiles from Mexico and walled by a thick green-glass barrier that stood about four and a half feet high.

She was standing there wearing a pale pink dress that came down to just about the middle of her well-developed calves. With one hand on the ledge of green-glass brick wall she was gazing down along the coastal mountains where they tumbled into the ocean.

“The door was unlocked again,” I said.

She turned her body without moving her feet, smiled, and said, “Hi.”

That one movement cinched it. The daughter of my heart was becoming a woman.

“The door,” I insisted.

“Daddy, we’re on a mountaintop and we know all our neighbors. If somebody knocks, I don’t ask, Who is it? I just open up.”

I was thinking about Craig Kilian and the door to our offices, which we kept unlocked during business hours. I remembered him jumping across the desk at me.

“Sometimes our neighbors have guests,” I said, “and even though we know the people around us, that doesn’t mean we know everything about them.”

“You’re just being paranoid.”

“That may very well be, but I still need you to respect me and do what I say.”

Feather turned fully around, taking my words seriously.

“I do respect you,” she said.

“But you got to lock the door behind that.”

“What happened today, Daddy?”

I took in a deep breath. Both my adopted children, Jesus and Feather, were in many ways more intelligent, definitely more mature than I.

Jackson Blue, who had read and retained every important book the central library had to offer, once told me that when a child is orphaned at an early age a large part of his psyche remains fixated there.

“It’s like the boy just turns into a man instead’a growin’ up into one,” he said.

I’d been on my own since the age of eight.

I told Feather about Craig Kilian and how he had a breakdown from hearing a sonic boom. When I finished she smiled and said, “I’ll be sure to lock the door from now on.”

It took a minute for the fears and anger to settle, then another to appreciate that Feather saw it as a duty to calm me when I worried about her.

“You want me to make you some orange tea?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Let’s go upstairs.”

All the staircases in Roundhouse, as we had dubbed our domicile, ran along the curved outer walls. Twenty-four-inch steel-braced snakewood stairs jutted out from the white, adobelike walls, accompanied by curved brass banisters that were anchored twice—on one floor and then the next.