“I mean, we have one at home outside. Not inside like this,” Mercedes says quickly. I just nod. I don’t trust myself to tell any more stories.

“Ah, well,” Manuel King says. He grabs the wastebasket and empties it into his big gray trash can. “If I see Señor Gómez, I tell him his beautiful hijas are here waiting.”

“Thanks!” Mercedes says, and then slams the door shut.

My breathing is slowing. “That was close!” I say to Mercedes. “Too close.”

“But it worked out,” she says. “And now we’re in. I told you it was going to be fine.” She swings herself into the hammock. “I want one of these in my room.” She pushes off a bookshelf, sending the hammock rocking back and forth.

I duck under the hammock and sit in Francisco Gómez’s desk chair. This is the chair that my father sits in. There are no blinds on the window and so the glass becomes a mirror. Would he recognize his daughter’s face?

The desk is covered in papers and magazines and books. My mom is constantly telling me to clean my room, my desk, my closet. But I always know where everything is. I tell her that putting things away would just make me lose stuff. Francisco Gómez’s desk is messier than my room ever is. Maybe he’s like me.

“What are you finding?” Mercedes asks.

Just like the search results from Mercedes’s phone, the papers and magazines are in Spanish and in English. He’s left notes along the margins in green pen. His handwriting is small and neat, mostly capital letters except for the A’s. I open the top desk drawer and find a box of green ballpoint pens. “He sure likes green,” I say to Mercedes, holding up the box.

“Let’s take one,” she says. “A souvenir!”

There are probably a dozen pens in the box. “Will he notice if two are missing?”

“He didn’t seem to notice two missing daughters.”

Her words are like a prick in my finger. I take a pen and toss Mercedes another.

“Keep looking.”

I dig deeper. “Just a stack of sticky notes, a bunch of paper clips. That’s it,” I say, rummaging through the drawer. And in the back, I see a scrap of paper. It’s worn and yellowed. Layers of old tape frame the edges. Hand-drawn stars dot the paper. In shaky print, someone has written:

Las estrellas no son la misma cosa para todos. Para los que viajan, las estrellas son guías; para otros solo son pequeñas lúcitas.… Pero las estrellas no dicen nada.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I can’t read the Spanish words, but I recognize the long name right away. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The author of the book on my nightstand at home, The Little Prince.

“What else is in there? Any other souvenirs we can take?”