As soon as she’d spoken about parrot parents, a thought winged into her brain: not one person in our company has a mother. Not a living mother. Not that anyone has spoken about.

She turned to Allam. “Is your mother alive?”

“Yes. She is eighty-nine and lives with her youngest sister in Beirut. Not a refugee camp. An apartment. She has lived there a long time and wants to stay with her sister. Even so, I am concerning myself about her. I talk to her on the phone one day each week.”

Gwen opened the door to the cage. She walked to the centre of the family room and stood with arms outstretched. Rico barely hesitated. He flew directly to her and perched on her right arm, the favoured arm, or so it seemed. She felt his toes grasp. Allam observed this and muttered something. He backtracked in silence and went out through the front door. Gwen heard the latch click behind him. Rico echoed the sound with an identical click of his own.

She moved slowly toward the kitchen while Rico made his gradual descent toward her wrist. She sat at the table, and he hopped over to the tabletop. From there, he flew down to the floor. He seemed to want the extra step while travelling from cage to forearm to wrist to table to floor.

Gwen was watering the jade when she heard the front door reopen. Rico, in explorer mode in the kitchen, raised his head and stared in the direction of the noise. He did not sound his alarm.

Allam came into the Grands’ kitchen carrying a sturdy branch he’d liberated from a tangle of prunings at the side of the garage. He had stripped off the bark and any protruding twigs. The branch was slightly more than two feet long, its diameter ideal for a perch.

“I will find a way to set this up in the room,” he said. “So he will have a place to land when he leaves the cage.” His voice softened. “After that, you will not be the human cross.”

Sacrificial. He had seen her as sacrificial in that moment. She hadn’t thought about self-immolation. Was that a condition that lay under the surface of her life? Maybe some women were better at self-immolation than others and she took the grand prize.

She wondered what Rico used to land on when the Grands let him out. Perhaps he flew straight to Cecilia with no fanfare at all. No arms outstretched, no perch. Or maybe a quick left turn through the air to the kitchen.

If so, he had never done that with Gwen.

SHE AND ALLAM DROVE BACK to her house in the late afternoon. The thin layer of snow had hardened over the surface of the lawn, but there hadn’t been a huge snowstorm so far. They took off their boots and jackets and headed for the kitchen. Allam had been in her home several times now. They always sat in the kitchen, and now, while she filled the kettle to make tea, he pulled two mugs from the cupboard and set them on the table. He’d been telling her about the class he was taking and about the teacher, whom he respected because she was good and she was committed to helping students navigate the ins and outs of speaking Canadian.