On one of our trips back to the hotel, on a particularly burning-hot afternoon, I ask Kat if there’s anything I can do for her. I want to help her feel comfortable with the transition that we can all sense is coming. Candace and I both know living in a hotel is no life for a child and that at some point a more permanent arrangement has to be made. We are living in limbo every day we are here. It is so disconcerting that I sometimes find myself staring off into the distance.

“Do you want to talk about anything?” I ask her. “Do you want to tell me what’s bothering you?”

And to my surprise she leans into me and murmurs, “I want . . . to go home.”

It is a giant of a sentence for a girl who hardly ever speaks, and such a surprising one; so surprising that for a moment I am speechless.

“Home?” I finally echo.

“I want to go home.”

I don’t know how to respond to her. What is she thinking of when she thinks of home? It can’t be here in Tucson with her mother or she wouldn’t have uttered these words. Is it the house in San Francisco? Did that place, with me there as her second mother, feel like home to her? The thought that this might be true is dizzyingly sweet one moment but achingly disquieting the next. I haven’t even shared with her that the house we lived in is most likely gone.

“I have something I need to tell you about our house in San Francisco,” I say. “I probably should have told you sooner, but we’ve been so busy with . . . all the changes.”

She tips her head up to look at me, her questioning eyes inviting me to continue.

“The fire that was so terrible when we were sleeping in the park? It came to our street, Kat, and I’m pretty sure that it took the house. The clothes and toys and drawings that were in your room . . . I’m sorry to tell you, poppet, but I believe they are gone. I think all the houses in our neighborhood are gone.”

Her eyes widen but she says nothing.

“But I want you to know that if the fire did take our house, what was inside it can be replaced,” I say. “You can get new clothes and new toys and new books, all right?”

She stares at me, taking in this news silently. And then she whispers, “Timmy’s house, too?”

“I don’t know for sure, love. Timmy’s house was made of bricks so maybe it did not burn all the way. But he wasn’t home then, remember? He and his parents were gone the morning the earth shook. They weren’t there. I’m sure he’s fine.”

“My house is burnt?”

“Yes, love, I think it is.”

She ponders this silently for a moment, as she looks out the carriage window. I can’t tell what she is thinking. I am about to ask her if this news is upsetting her when she turns her face upward toward mine again.