Shan jumped in the shower, turned the water hot, let the steam fog the inside glass walls. She threw on a shirt, twisted her hair tight in a bun. She hadn’t expected to hear from Deepa, certainly not while she was still in Amsterdam. She pulled on her boots, rushed out of the room. She had six hours before her flight.

Deepa had beaten her to the café and snagged a table. A cup and saucer sat in front of her, the tea already half drunk. She opened her hand. A yellowed paper crane, no longer than Shan’s thumb, sat in its center. Ink was smeared over a few of the folds.

“It’s all I have of your grandfather,” Deepa said. “I want you to have it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m a very old woman, if you hadn’t noticed. I won’t be able to hold on to it forever.”

Shan gently picked it up, cradled it in her hand. She imagined her grandfather’s fingers, folding and creasing, writing neat letters hidden inside. She imagined a girl, a boy, falling in love through art.

“There’s something you should know,” Deepa said. “Before he died, Vijay had made a decision to return to the States, to Seattle,” Deepa said.

Shan leaned forward, certain she hadn’t heard her correctly. “Dad was coming home? When did he decide this?”

“During my last conversation with him, a few weeks before he died, he told me he was going to forget about visiting Lahore. That he was no longer going to search for Amir or Laila. He said the time he spent looking for his father wouldn’t make up for the time he was losing out on with you.”

Shan set the crane on the table. Her mind rewound the time to the end of their India trip. At the Seattle airport, after her father delivered Shan safely to her mother’s arms, he leaned over, kissed her cheeks, and told her something she didn’t fully understand, but never forgot. “I’ll see you, kiddo. Maybe sooner than you think.”

“I wish I’d known,” she finally said. For years, she had wondered what she’d done to make her father leave. If she had known he was coming back to her, it would have meant everything.

“I need to go now,” Deepa said. She picked up her bag.

“Wait,” Shan said. “Your poem, ‘Child,’ the one you read last night. It’s about my father, isn’t it?”

Deepa looked down, touched the blue veins that ran over the top of her hand. “I wrote ‘Child’ in August of 1985. It was the last poem I wrote for the collection. It wasn’t about Vijay.”