That night, reading Elena’s skepticism, Mauro asked why it was so hard to believe the condor could have returned to the city. “This was its territory before man occupied it, after all. Maybe it came to remind us what we’ve stolen.”

Years later, when Mauro was down to his final days before deportation, he called Elena from the detention center and asked if she remembered the night he saw the condor fly over him on their roof. She told him she did.

“Do you know that when a condor is old or sick, or if its mate dies, it will push itself to fly higher than ever before, then drop out of the sky to end its own life?”

“I didn’t know that.”

She remembered that when they returned to their bedroom after searching for signs of the condor, they’d stood by Karina’s crib, watching as she slept. Her parents’ absence hadn’t pulled her awake. Mauro whispered then that a condor, which could live as long as a human, was faithful to one partner for life. Together they nested on impenetrable cliffs, sharing the duties of incubation, making a home for their family only they were able to reach.

Friends told Elena that when a child and a parent are reunited after so many years apart, the distance and time can be more difficult to breech than either anticipated. They warned her not to have unrealistic expectations for her daughter’s attachment to her or for her family’s bonding once she arrived. She tried to prepare herself for possible outcomes. She knew that when Talia landed she might feel so overwhelmed with the deluge of English, the vacillating weather, so far from her city and mountains she might eventually beg for a return ticket home, so Elena budgeted some money in case. She would not deny her daughter the right to go back to Colombia the way she’d denied it to herself. She knew Mauro’s arms would be hard for her daughter to leave and accepted that after so many years apart she likely loved her father far more.

She blamed herself for displacing her own children, especially her girls. Karina and Talia, binational, each born in one country and raised in another like repotted flowers, creatures forced to live in the wrong habitat. She’d watched the child who came to her that winter in Delaware grow through photographs and phone lines. Her voice was always new when they spoke. Her other children had lost much of their Spanish and sometimes Elena imagined it was Talia, the daughter she did not raise yet who had grown up in the same home as her mother, who knew her best.

When Karina and Nando were small, living in those cramped basements, they asked Elena why they didn’t have a house of their own like the families on TV. “We have a house,” she told them. “We just don’t live in it because it’s far away.”

“But why?” they asked over and over.

“Because we live here,” she would say, wishing there was a way they could comprehend what even she couldn’t. She was never sure if she’d made the right decision in staying. Eventually she’d understand that in matters of migration, even accidental, no option is more moral than another. There is only the path you make. Any other would be just as wrong or right.