He doesn’t tell her she doesn’t mean it. In the heart of her rage, he is sure she does. He looks out into the woods beyond the garden. He imagines the bird flying out from Thora’s hand: a rush of panicked freedom, then a pause on the fence, halfway between somewhere and somewhere else. Santi has always tried to read the world for symbols. But this one—a feral thing fleeing from offered love—he refuses. His daughter is not a bird. She is Thora. And he is not letting her go so easily. “Maybe she’ll come back to visit,” he says.

Thora shakes her head violently. “She won’t come back. Even if she did, she won’t remember me. It’ll be like I never existed.”

“But you’ll remember her.” He wonders why the words feel so heavy, as if they are talking of things as vast as galaxies.

“That just makes it worse.” She looks up at him, eyes wide and tearless. “I never want to see her again.”

Santi is developing an intuition for Thora, like a plant’s blind awareness of the sun. He needs to let her deal with this alone. He squeezes her shoulder and starts back toward the house.

His intuition is wrong. The argument isn’t over. “Why do you always think you know better than me?”

Santi stops, turns. All the answers—because I’m your parent, because I’m older—seem as empty as lies. “I don’t,” he says. “Right now, it’s just my job to pretend to.” That’s unexpected enough to silence her. He sighs. He’s so tired: too tired to repress the question he’s not allowed to ask. “Why are you so angry with me?”

Her face stays still. He knows her well enough now to be aware of the emotions underneath, emotions he suspects even she doesn’t understand.

He steps off known ground, following his explorer’s instinct that there is something out there in the wild worth finding. “Thora, I’m not the one who left you.”

She stares at him, something uncanny in her eyes. “But you will.”

He crouches in front of her, takes her unwilling hand. “I’ll never leave you.”

He shouldn’t lie to her. He needs to be reliable, predictable, not making impossible promises. But in the moment he says it, he believes it. As he looks at Thora, he sees her believe it too.

“Liar,” she spits. She pushes his hand away and runs into the house, slamming the door behind her.

Santi rubs his tired eyes. He looks up, where the stars he copied onto her ceiling are obscured by clouds. An old desire takes hold of him: to be up there, to see all this from an angle that could make sense of it.