In the photo she is young and slim with clear skin and a broad smile. She is leaning against a young man. His arms are wrapped around her and her hands are crossed over his. She looks easily into the camera lens, a young woman loved.

Edina traced her finger over the photo as if the skin on the young man’s face was still warm. She said, Look what I lost.

What happened to him?

She put the photo back in her bag and said, I only wanted you to see him. Do not ask. I love a ghost.

—

While I waited for the beginning of the trial I worked a lot for Jacques Payac. I took on freelance work. I edited, wrote advertising copy and saved money. I worked early in the morning and was home every day for Biddy after school and all through the evenings. I spent as much time as I could with her. She was fifteen and she wanted to know I was there but did not much want to be with me. Mostly I listened to her moving above me in her room. One night I slipped into her bedroom to talk and she was sitting between two cheval mirrors and I asked her what she was doing and she said, I am trying to figure out infinity.

I said, During the trial I will come back and forth but I will be away longer than other times.

Mam told me.

She did?

Biddy shook her head as if I were the child. She said, Where you’re going is the place my father comes from, isn’t it?

No, the trials are in The Hague, but they are about the war in his country.

She looked down the line of mirrors at the endlessly repeating girl.

She said, I want to know him. Try to find him.

You will meet him very soon.

She felt something in my voice and she kept looking into the mirrors and said to her infinite reflection, You found him, didn’t you?

She knew, of course. Children watch and know. Biddy was becoming as separate from me as I was from Mam. What else did I not know about her? I told her that I had found him and that in a small way he was involved in the trial, and that when it was over we would go to him together.

When?

As soon as the trial is over.

Why did he leave us?

He was never really with us. And later there was war.

The long line of girls in the mirror were all nodding at the same time.

I said, Biddy, tell me what you are doing in school. I’ve been away too much.

I’m okay, she said. I’m used to it.

She liked astrophysics. She told me that Mam said she could learn to fly. She said she wanted to go to Chile, to the star observatory in the Atacama Desert. She said that when she was older she wanted to work there.