Our father shakes his head. “I never married again. I never had more children.” Then he taps his phone. “But these people, the people I study, are like family. The other humans you spend your time with—it doesn’t matter if you’re related to them or not. They start to feel like family. Like home.”

I think about the people in my house. Bob and Lucas and Kenny. When will they feel like family? Like home?

“What about us?” Mercedes asks. Her words jab through her clenched teeth.

Francisco Gómez doesn’t say anything at first. He tucks the phone back in his bag. He doesn’t look at us.

“Yeah,” I say in a small voice, “what about us?”

He sighs. His hair on his forehead flutters in the rush of air. He takes another sip of coffee.

“This is very hard for me to talk about. I have always wondered what I would tell you, mis hijas, if I ever had the chance to meet you.” Mercedes and I don’t take our eyes off him. “I thought I wanted a life with your mother, Matilde. When I met Valerie, I thought that we would be happy, that a life in Minnesota was all I would need. We were in love. She was so happy. But I wasn’t happy. I realized that I needed to be back in Colombia. In the field. The mountains. The jungle. To do my work, to be myself. I didn’t know how to be myself in Minnesota. So I let her go.”

He let me go, too, I think.

“And what about my mom?” Mercedes demands. Tears are leaking out of the corner of her eyes.

“Jennifer was such an adventurer. So strong. Is she still like that? She went into the mountains with me for a couple weeks—did she tell you? But I had to stay, and she had to leave. She didn’t tell me until later about the baby that would come. You.”

“Didn’t you ever want to meet us?”

Francisco Gómez studies his hands, folded on the tabletop. It’s like he’s trying to decide what to say, which words to use. But he wrote a whole book, so shouldn’t he know all the words?

“Your mother, Matilde, and your mother, Mercedes,” he says at last, “they wanted to protect you from missing a man who spends all of his time in the jungle.”

The way he says the word “jungle” makes it sound like a different planet, a faraway solar system. He says “jungle” like it means more than trees and animals, like it’s a place where no one can follow him. Is the jungle a place with many secrets, just like the sky in his poem?

“They both wanted it this way. And I needed to respect what they wanted. Valerie, Jennifer. They are the mothers. They decide what is best.”