She’s not hurt. She’s sitting cross-legged next to the crib Héloïse couldn’t bear to throw out or give away. Her fingers slip between the bars, like she’s playing with a baby’s ghost.

“You wanted your own children.” The words he hoped she’d never say. They curl from her mouth like tangling vines.

He’s supposed to say, You are our child. We never wanted anyone but you. But he knows her better now: knows when the approved phrases will hit their mark, and when she will deflect them with deadly force at his heart.

“We tried, yes,” he says. “But it wasn’t meant to be.”

“Meant to be?” The phrase contorts Thora’s mouth. “My parents were meant to look after me. I was meant to do well at school and go to uni and learn physics and biology and be an astronaut.” Santi flinches; Thora doesn’t see her blow land. “But that didn’t happen. And you and Héloïse didn’t get your own children, you got me.” She shakes her head in fury, pulling her sleeves down over her wrists. “None of us got to choose. The only difference is you want to make it mean something. Like this was what God wanted all along. When it’s just what we got stuck with.”

Santi has run out of bullet points, of reasonable discussions in a calm voice. He can’t confess how close her words have cut to his secret fear: that he is the worst kind of liar, taking whatever he’s not too lazy to accomplish and calling it fate.

A thud against the attic window. Santi jumps in holy terror: God’s fist on the glass. Thora is already at the window, carefully delineating the ghost of wings.

“Oh.” A quiet exhalation. She has become another person in the time it took for a bird to die. She pushes past Santi, sliding down the ladder so fast it must hurt her hands.

He follows her down and out into the garden. “Did you find it?” he asks, approaching her as if she is the bird: fallen, half -dead and half-alive.

Thora opens her hands. The bird is a bright, startling green: one of the feral parakeets that have colonized the city. It lies perfect as a simulacrum, wings folded, eyes closed.

“What a shame,” Santi says.

“She’s not dead,” Thora says forcefully. She blows gently on the bird, ruffling its feathers. It twitches, eyes opening and closing.

Santi feels a surge of hope, intoxicating as wine. “Bring it inside. We need to keep it warm.”