“The invisible shield that protects us from space.”

“Now I remember. But it sounds kind of weird and made up?”

“But it’s true. Pop quiz.”

“Not another one!”

“Just one more. What’s the difference between a meteor and a meteorite?”

“One of them doesn’t burn up in the sky? One of them you can find in the ground and is worth lots of money?”

“That’s right! Which one is the one that survives? Which is the one that strikes the Earth?”

“Meteor . . .”—she dragged out the r and looked at him with a scrunched-up face—“. . . ite?”

“Meteorite. Yes.”

“Will any survive? Will there be any that come down and survive?”

“Given how busy the sky is, I’d say definitely.”

“Oh,” Mia said and fogged the window with her breath as she peered outside. “The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” she said in a singsong voice. “But the meteorites that survive can’t hurt us. Right, Daddy?”

“No, sweetie. You’re safe. Totally safe.”

“Okay. That’s good.”

Once they drove out of Seattle, once the buildings and streetlamps slid away, once they pulled off the interstate and then the highway and the firs and hemlocks walled them in, Mia grew quiet. Mist ghosted the air. The truck moaned and clanked as they traveled the rutted logging road. “This is creepy,” Mia said.

“Just imagine it in the sun,” Jack said. “That’s not creepy, right? A dark space is exactly the same as a sunlit space, only without photons and infrared rays and electromagnetic radiation.”

In response, Mia clicked on her flashlight and shone it out the window as if that might brighten the world. “Still creepy.”

Mia was born with a lot of hair, a dark mess of curls that didn’t respond well to a brush. She had gray eyes and bony shoulders and big feet that she was constantly tripping over. She always seemed to have lost another tooth, so her smile was never the same, changing with the gaps. She rarely stopped moving. Even when sitting, she shifted her weight, twitched her face, picked at her scabs.

This was a good age. Maybe the best age. Eight. Between seven and twelve, Jack’s friends told him, kids weren’t tantrum-prone whiners who couldn’t tie their own shoes and they also weren’t asshole teenagers who slammed doors and demanded unlimited data plans. Eight-year-olds worshipped you but didn’t cling to you. Mia could go on a five-mile hike, fish a river, watch Raiders of the Lost Ark, read The Hobbit, and talk to Jack, really talk, asking hard questions and testing out opinions and shaping her tastes.