And once again he reminded me of myself, thinking everything in this world was a potential start-up. Actually believing the only thing that could drive a man to action was the desire to succeed. But I didn’t want to make millions, I wanted to help my daughter.

“You’re wrong,” I told Nicolai. “There is a project. I remember. I know.” He tried to tell me it made no sense. That he had asked around the research department and they all told him with complete certainty that there was no project. That today’s technology just wasn’t advanced enough to re-create dreams.

“But I need it,” I mumbled more to myself than to him.

“Why do you need it? Explain to me, maybe that way I understand,” Nicolai said in a worried tone.

“My little girl …,” I said, and started telling him about Shira. About her decline. About the hospitals and everything we’d gone through those past three months, letting it all out without coming up for air. Nicolai listened quietly, without saying a word. And only when I was done did I realize it was the first time I had talked about Shira without someone who wasn’t Nelly. That actually, it was the first time since moving south that I’d really talked to anyone.

“It sounds awful,” Nicolai said. He hesitated for a moment and then lifted his hand somewhat awkwardly and patted my back in a strange gesture of solidarity.

“I bet research warned you not to say anything, that’s fine, don’t tell me what it is, just tell me there’s something,” I said. “So I’ll know I have something to count on.”

“I wish there was, but really, there isn’t,” he said what I knew but refused to accept. “If you want, I can lie to you that there is,” he said reluctantly.

I smiled. I told Nicolai how I’d been looking forward to going home and telling Nelly I had found a way to help Shira.

“Believe me, there’s nothing worse than being helpless with your child,” I said. “There really isn’t.”

“But maybe that’s something a person has to know how to be,” he said, and quickly qualified his statement, saying he didn’t have kids so he didn’t actually know.

We continued to talk for maybe twenty minutes, half an hour. By which I mean he talked and I nodded. I can’t really remember what he went on about. I wasn’t listening. I was trying to process the thought of having no way of helping Shira, and I didn’t know how to do that. Finally I told him I needed to get back to her.

“Want me to buy you cup of coffee for road, so you won’t fall asleep at wheel?” he suggested. I politely declined.