“What if I want to come back?”

“You can. You have two places to call home.”

A goodbye is always too brief, or maybe she’d been saying goodbye since she came to Colombia, aware for as long as she’d collected memories that her place there was only provisional.

“What if I don’t love my mother the way I love you?”

“You will. You do. When you see her you will remember.”

“And my brother and sister?”

“They are a part of you too.”

“I don’t want to go.” This came from some unknowable place but now felt truer than anything. “Don’t make me leave you.”

Her father was quiet. He knew that if she stayed the authorities would come for her and send her back to the school on the mountain or another one like it. And even after she completed her sentence, restlessness would never leave her until she returned to her point of origin. She could not leave, but she could not stay.

His eyes were dry, but she knew it was because he’d learned to cry without tears. They said all the things a father and daughter say to each other when they are not sure when or how they will ever see each other again.

How many years would pass between this moment and that one?

How would they be changed by a life apart?

She already felt aged by the day. No longer fifteen but as if she’d lived a decade more and understood, though she didn’t yet know how, that this would be the morning she would dream of, guard in her palms like a loose pearl during her future loneliness.

How stupid she was to think leaving would be as easy as handing over her ticket and finding her seat on the plane. She did not yet know she would mourn this morning like a death.

Mauro watched her as far as the airport perimeters would allow. When she reached the front of the line and gave her passport to the customs agent, she turned and saw him peering from the corner along the last visible stretch of airport tunnel. She had to go on without him. He would stay at the airport until her plane was in the clouds, he’d said. Her phone was programmed to dial him with a single touch should she be detained. They’d prepared in every way for the worst possible outcome, but everything was happening faster than expected. The agent waved her on. At the security checkpoint, while others were asked to step aside to have their bags individually examined, she passed through with ease. Her father was out of sight, but she knew he was still close.

From her window seat the city unspooled, dissolving like salt in water. The exquisite madness of the cordilleras, bottle-green valleys devoured by doughy clouds until there was nothing to see but white and more white. When the pilot announced they’d left Colombian airspace, a man a few rows back started singing the national anthem but only made it through the first verse about goodness coming from pain, not to the parts about battles and bloodshed. Over the blue ribbons of the Caribbean she managed to sleep. When she woke, the plane was shaking in descent over another gray city. No mountains. Only flatness winged by obsidian rivers scabbed in concrete and steel.