Santi closes the tin and pushes it back under the bed. “No. We need her to know she’s safe.” He carefully puts back the papers he found next to it, hand-drawn maps of impossible worlds.

Héloïse chews on her lip, an old habit that’s gotten worse in recent weeks. “Maybe she’ll never feel safe, not completely. Maybe everything that’s happened to her took that part of her away.”

There is nothing Santi hates more than hopelessness. “Time,” he says. “That’s what she needs.”

He calls his mother. He sits on the tree stump at the end of the garden, because Thora doesn’t like hearing him talk in Spanish.

“Why?” he asked her the first time she got upset.

“You could be talking about me and I wouldn’t even know.”

He rolled his eyes. “Thora, I’m not constantly discussing you.”

Now, the summer dark is heavy. A night bird he can’t identify makes soft sounds in the trees.

“Bring her here,” says his mother. “Why don’t you bring her? I want to meet my granddaughter.”

Santi rubs his forehead. He hasn’t been back home since he moved to Cologne. Instead, he’s waited for his family to come to him. There’s always too much happening here: Héloïse, his job, now Thora. “We’ll come, when the little magpie is more settled.” The nickname is only for these phone calls. Nothing would feed Thora’s paranoia more than conversations sprinkled with her name in a language she doesn’t understand.

His mother doesn’t tell him what she’s thinking, but he hears it anyway. That his little magpie will never settle. That she will batter herself bloody against the bars of the cage he has built to keep her safe.

Later that week, he comes home from Der Zentaur and sets his keys down on the kitchen table. Félicette jumps up and rubs against his hand. “Thora?” he calls up the stairs.

The house vibrates with unnatural quiet. He goes to knock on the door of her room. “I’m coming in,” he says, and pushes it open. Her usual mess: the panpipe of water glasses on the windowsill, the crochet square abandoned on her bed. He checks the bathroom—empty—and finally his and Héloïse’s room, although he doesn’t seriously expect to find her there. Santi reads what the world tells him, and right now it is spelling out disaster. He decides to call the police.

Then he hears something shuffle in the ceiling.

He opens the attic door. She’s pulled the ladder up after herself, an outlaw making safe her den. He pulls it down and hurries up the creaking treads, terrified that she has hurt herself, that he’s failed at the only important thing he’s ever tried to do.