In the morning, the storm was over and the air was heavy and still. Ava went out into the yard. She began to walk. She thought about the moment when she opened her eyes, and the first time she felt sunlight on her skin, and of Paris when they got off the train, and the Seine at night, and the heron dancing in the garden. She was walking faster by now. She was thinking for herself. The world, however cruel it might be, was too glorious to give up. She had no rights to it, she wasn’t human, but neither was the heron, and he had rights no human had, the rights of flight and sight. She stopped at the crest of a hill and turned to gaze back at the farm. There were the fields, and the barn, and in the distance the neighbor’s cow pastures and orchards. Lea came through the door still in her nightgown, her feet bare. Ava felt a catch in her throat to think of how the girl might feel when she realized she was alone. But she was no longer a child, and when Julien arrived they could make their way to the border.

Ava might have walked over the mountain and vanished, but when she turned she saw that Lea had left the house. As the girl proceeded toward the barn, Ava spied Azriel in the tree beside the beehives, glimmering in the leaves. The wooden hives had smashed open when the wind threw them over and now honey was leaking into the ground. Azriel had been reading from his book of names, but as soon as Lea came near, he gazed up.

Ava was stricken as the angel moved from branch to branch. It was only at that moment that she realized she could gasp, like any ordinary woman. Her breath came out hot and fevered, burning her throat. Lea was headed toward the barn, a pan of crusts for the goat in her hands. Was it possible that Lea saw the angel? She put one hand over her eyes and stared into the tree, confused. You could not see him unless he came for you, unless he was ready to take you in his embrace, and then you could see him so clearly the rest of the world disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Ava ran down the hill through the pine forest, her head pounding.

By then Lea had gone into the barn to let the goat off her rope. Bluebell, intoxicated with freedom after the terror of the storm, dashed out before she could be caught, racing through the field.