“When I came home that day, I found her that way. She was locked in the basement. Just like my mother had done to me. She tried to explain, but all I wanted to do was push her down those basement stairs and run. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave her.”

He pulled Lavi closer to him, whispered into her ear, and kissed the top of her head.

Therese covered her ears.

“Listen to me!” he yelled. “Do you know what it feels like to send someone you love away? I love her, Therese. Please, let me see her.”

She watched as he held the girl in his lap, rocking her back and forth, his tears spilling down and disappearing inside the curves of her curls, which she realized were familiar because they reminded her of Franny’s. The girl coughed and shifted in Tim’s arms, and Therese let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Smoke was starting to clear, and, as it did, the deep sense of his loss began to move through her like frost, making her fingers and toes go numb. She took her hands off her ears and looked at him.

He was quiet, lost somewhere in his thoughts. “Do you think she will ever forgive me?”

The familiarity of the question startled her. How could it be so different, yet the same? She closed her eyes, mostly because she wasn’t ready to experience the revelations that were beginning to come. Leah and Tim and her own father’s face swam through her as if she was liquid, grabbing at her insides so hard that she toppled back. She wanted to hurt him. To punish him. She took a deep breath, fully intending to tell him that he had wasted his life on a lie, but when she spoke, a different truth emerged.

“She will love you too much to care.” She whispered her words—the same words she had said to Leah—and watched as they disappeared into the silky air. He looked back at her with his translucent gray eyes, except this time she could see through and into him. It made her heart skip, but before she could speak again, he had risen to his feet and run off.

Sirens blared in the distance, getting louder as the ambulance approached the development of townhomes. Therese fell to the floor next to Lavi’s mother, who had crawled over to her daughter, who was now beginning to stir.