It’s important to argue for change but it is impossible to bend another’s will, wrote nine-year-old Leda. This must be acknowledged and respected, do you see? BUT … If I could REALLY change the world, I would have everyone be happy and cheerful, but not TOO cheerful or happy because then there would be too much of it. Do you see? Everyone needs a conflict.

Maybe it was a red flag. It was all too possible that it was a red flag. What kind of nine-year-old craves conflict? The students had not yet been taught conflict as part of a good story, the teacher had clarified. At least not in those terms. “Where did she get that?” The teacher had laughed admiringly. Matthew and Sarah had laughed right along with Leda’s delighted teachers during those elementary school years. Leda dreamed of going to unusual places, not Tanzania or Marrakech but more like Tulsa, Cleveland. She loved to climb as high as she could. She was a beautiful child. Exceptional. She was completely normal. She was affectionate, funny. She had always been too intense.

“What made you think of that?” Matthew asked.

Sarah shrugged. “Who the hell knows.” She kept her eyes trained on the pines and weeds of one New York State highway, the pale nothing sky. “I’m disoriented.”

Kiki and Arman had both been so good to Leda. How could Sarah have let them go? She knew, of course. It went beyond their move to L.A. three years into sharing that garden (leaving Sarah and Matthew to meet new neighbors, build a fence, then move) and everyone’s ambitions and Sarah and Matthew’s parenthood and beyond how Sarah wasn’t great on the phone. She knew why she’d stopped returning Kiki’s calls and then her texts, in the same certain way that she knew she’d cry at some point during the weekend when she looked in Kiki’s eyes and saw pity. Arman would be able to mask it, but Kiki was too open: she had a face like a Flemish portrait, a face built to cry.

Sarah had been the one to suggest naming her Leda. “It’s just a beautiful name,” she’d insisted, a quarter century ago. The name meant “joy” in Greek, but there was also no denying the association with the ancient myth, the poems and paintings from Yeats to Botero dedicated to the kinky seduction: Zeus took the form of a wild swan, seducing the queen of Sparta. Matthew had wanted to avoid such dramatic connotation. He’d argued against marking their daughter with that story—that rape. But Sarah had prevailed. It was interesting, she’d argued. And swans were beautiful. What a dope. She’d told herself countless times that a name could not dictate a life, but it nagged at her. Matthew had wanted to simply name her Joy; it was the least they could have done.