“Yeah, I guess I’d have to say that,” Izabel said. But she didn’t think that was true. She was pretty sure everyone thought about being at the top of cliffs and not at the bottom of them.

“So how do you spell ‘cliff’?”

“C-L-I-F-F,” Izabel said. And before she knew it they were at the community center.

The children’s therapists worked out of the community center because the children were all familiar with that space. When Izabel took off her blindfold, she saw girls spilling out of a room in ballet slippers and leotards. She put the scarf in her purse.

There were only a few men around. Izabel quickly sized them up, canceled them out. Too tall, too fat, couldn’t be him. She was doing better than she expected.

But then they turned a corner and Maris was there, down the hall, with a woman and two children. Maris’s back was turned to them but Izabel recognized her immediately.

“Did you know?” Izabel said so loudly that all the children in the hall went silent.

Maris turned around.

“Did you know!” Izabel shouted, approaching her.

Maris shook her head. “I only read the cards.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay, let’s get to our appointment,” Kaito said, getting his arm around Izabel’s waist.

“No!” Izabel screamed.

Maris started to move away from her, further down the hall, hands on the backs of the children, pushing them along.

“You knew!” Izabel yelled after her. “You knew!”

Kaito picked Izabel up and kept going toward the therapist’s office. Cami stayed near his leg. And Izabel kept screaming at Maris until she couldn’t see her anymore.

Izabel tried to settle down in the waiting room. Cami rubbed her back and told her not to be sad. The rubs felt more like Cami was smushing a fly into her back, trying to kill it.

“Thanks, honey,” Izabel said.

Then Cami crawled onto Kaito’s lap and asked if she could play on his tablet. She brought up a game of monsters that needed to solve math puzzles in order to get monster snacks.

Cami got annoyed whenever Kaito looked away, even if she didn’t need him for anything in the game. To her, it didn’t count that they were together unless they were both looking at the same thing.

Izabel suggested Cami play with the zen water painting set that was on the table. Cami shook her head and turned her face into her father’s neck. He reached his hand up onto her head and one finger slipped into her thin hair. Izabel imagined his hand with one less finger, his hand coming back out from Cami’s hair, and that one finger soundly healed over at the knuckle.