In those days, Audrey and Jason were still living with Simon. Her grandfather’s house was nearly a museum to the memory of Margot. Simon didn’t like it when things were touched, and Lara seemed to explore the world with her fingertips—candied fingertips. As Cecile was much more forgiving with the furniture, Lara spent most of her childhood at her great-grandmother’s. Simon disliked noise as well, so Jason converted Cecile’s garage into a makeshift music studio where his bandmates came to jam at all hours, the sound floating through the open window screens.

Summers were blissful with the lush fields and the wavelike chorus of the locusts. Like their own personal amusement park. Lara and her friends wandered around the old circus equipment—trailers and rides—rotting in the field, eventually finding one of the old circus tents in one of the trailers, its canvas ripped but salvageable. Jason helped them stretch it out over the field and found the old poles to get it set up.

Shortly after the tent had been raised, Lara was twirling her baton, imagining she had an audience for her arm rolls and fishtails. It had been a year since she’d seen the mysterious man and woman.

She was working on her timed thumb tosses, counting the number of times she could flip her baton over her thumb and catch it with a quick wrist motion, Cecile’s egg timer set for one minute. Lara counted aloud. As the timer went off, she’d done fifty-two tosses. There was a clapping and she looked up to see the man standing there at the entrance to the tent. This time, he was solo.

“It’s really you?” He was dressed in a gold costume, kind of like Elvis. To her surprise, she realized how much she’d been looking for him in the last year.

“Did you fear that I was a figment of your imagination?” He leaned against a post, and she had a notion to tell him not to do that. All the posts in the tent were wobbly.

The little girl nodded. “I was beginning to.”

Through mirrored sunglasses, he looked up at the sagging canvas. “I see you put up the old circus tent. Tell me, do you like it?”

“I love it.” From the opening in the tent, she kept her eye on the horses beyond her—they were good judges of character. But they simply stood there watching the man, their tails swatting flies.

“That’s good.” The man stepped into the tent. It was a shabby beige-and-blue thing with uneven poles and a sag in the back that Jason had tried to fix by wedging an old tree branch under it. “The circus is in your blood, you know.”

“I do know that,” she chirped. Lara was confident as only a sheltered seven-year-old could be. “My family owned this circus.”