They were thoughts that came with the heartsickness of separation. He knew such fantasies well, from their earliest incarnations when he was sent to the campo by his mother to when he found himself in the detention center and when the Americans dispatched him back to his country alone. His daughter had left him, but she still came to him in his sleep, asking him to tell her stories about the lake, about Chiminigagua, about the ancestors, begging him to bring them with him when he arrived to meet her in the north.

At first, her calls were frequent. Daily. Sometimes twice, in the morning and before she went to sleep. She reported everything about her new life, gossiping affectionately about her mother and her siblings. She suspected her mother was a little frightened of her. Not because she might be dangerous, but as if she were some breakable object, like a centuries-old museum artifact on loan between nations.

Her brother and sister, she said, took her on outings to Manhattan, where she felt choked by crowds and buildings taller than their highest mountains, where the subway vibrations reminded her of the tremors she felt underfoot back home, Chibchacum adjusting his load; and to the beach, wide as a field and full of people, sand coarse and mottled with cigarette butts, the Atlantic water inky and cold.

Her English improved beyond television and movie dialogue. Her sister became her teacher, instructing her to read pages of novels aloud for an hour each night. On weekends, her family took her to the other town where their good friends lived and the adults, too, treated her as if she were a special thing, precious and symbolic as an emerald ensconced in gold. She worried they hadn’t yet figured out that she was ordinary, she told her father, exceptional only in her ability to do harm and to run away, and was terrified that someone would learn of her crime and time at the prison school and tell her mother.

The funny thing, she said, was that back home she felt she had so much to say, but in her new country everyone kept commenting how quiet she was. She even heard her mother describe her as shy. She worried she’d left her real self with her father and the girl who flew to the United States in her place, though she wore the same face, was someone else.

A few weeks after her departure, Mauro received a call from the police. They learned Talia had left the country. They knew the day and the hour, and he prayed they hadn’t searched security camera footage showing them together at the airport as he prepared to send her off. He was able to fake shock, which the police seemed to believe, since Elena had been the one to purchase the plane ticket. They asked if he’d heard from her. He said he hadn’t. They asked if he knew how to reach Elena, and he lied that they hadn’t spoken in years. And so the call turned to one of sympathy.