We drive for a few miles in silence. I think of Maddie. If she were a form of weather, then she’d be a summer breeze. I also reflect that we may not come away with any discoveries. Perhaps we should try to meet Maddie’s friends or her teachers. But how are we supposed to find them? My thoughts drift to my father. Did he have any friends? Did they like him? Did he ever mention me to them?

“What was my father good at?” I ask.

She replies without a second’s hesitation. “He was free of prejudice, Sam. That was one of his great strengths. He never thought of anybody as a ‘foreigner.’ He took a far more candid approach to the world and to others than all but a handful of people are able, or even want, to do. But he still had some blind spots. Have you heard of the blind spots of the soul? It’s when you’re unaware of some of your own characteristics, either unconsciously or deliberately. They might be weaknesses you refuse to accept or strengths you find unpleasant or creepy. Your father couldn’t see that he was wrong about himself. He thought he was incapable of love. I’ve figured out over time, Sam, that even the cleverest people are fools when it comes to love.”

I take a deep breath and decide to run an emotional gauntlet. “Did he ever talk to you about me?” My voice is walking a thin line between yellow and fear. It catches, but cracks only a little.

Eddie shakes her head.

I knew it, but I’d hoped it wasn’t true.

We fall silent, and an hour later we reach Oxford.

OXFORD IS a little like Dr. Saul’s disc world. On its outer edges, where the countryside rubs up against the outskirts, the city comes across as cool and dull, but then the city condenses into something altogether more substantial. We drive past ruins and neat little town houses, past pubs adorned with advertisements for the TV series Inspector Morse, and along streets that could have been lifted from the film Billy Elliot. The city center is wide awake, its thirty-eight colleges a combination of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts and a botanical garden. I spy punts drifting along the lazy side arms of the river Thames.

The streets in the center are packed with tourists and buskers, steeped in stories and emitting a gentle hum I can only hear in my mind. Is it the hum of thought and knowledge?

I’ve never seen so many church spires and battlements in one place, and of so many colors—copper, slate gray, white, and sandstone gold.