“I felt that hunger myself, Lyda. I felt like I was starving, that I was going to die. Is it like that for you? I could feel his weakness, how cold he was. I told the driver to stop. I gave the man my jacket. I took off my shoes. Then I gave him my wallet, and a smartcard that had access to my accounts. I even tried to give him the car!”

He chuckled. “My driver tried to stop me, but what could he do? I was his boss. In any case the man was too frightened by me to accept the car, or my clothing. He took my card, though.” He laughed again.

“My son heard what happened. The driver told him. Eduard took away my access—to my money first, then my company, then to anyone I used to work with. I kept trying to help people, give them what they needed. I couldn’t be trusted, he said. If I fought him, he would have me committed.” Edo shrugged. “Given my history, I knew this was no idle threat, eh? And I couldn’t afford to let that happen. So we moved out here. Oh, I travel when necessary. But Eduard only lets me see a few members of the board, and key customers who insist on meeting me, and I must follow the script. Because if I don’t—”

He stopped suddenly and put a hand to his face. He was overcome with some intense emotion: sadness, grief? I couldn’t tell. Something in the Numinous had made Edo into an empathic wreck. No wonder his son had isolated him.

I said, “‘Give everything to the poor and you will have treasure in Heaven.’”

“I’m sorry?” Edo said. His cheeks were wet with tears.

“The Bible story,” I said. “Rich man, the eye of the needle…?”

He still didn’t know what I was talking about. What kind of know-nothing god possessed him? “The rich man goes away sad,” I said. “He loves money too much to get into Heaven.”

Edo nodded. “Sounds like my son.”

The sun beat down. I could barely breathe, but Edo seemed to soak it in. During the trial he’d described his god as a great pulsing ball of light and heat, a flame that surrounded him but did not burn him. He was his own burning bush.

We eventually reached the compound. There were three buildings: a sprawling, two-story Spanish-style house; a four-bay garage; and, farther back, another adobe-walled building that could have been a guest house or offices. Rovil parked the car in the circle drive.

Edo stepped up to the front door, then realized I wasn’t following.

“I should have told you,” he said. “I was afraid.”

“You were afraid? Of me?”

“I was afraid you’d take her away.”

He opened the door. After a moment I followed him in. The foyer felt like an icebox. A dark-haired woman appeared from a far doorway and stopped, startled to see someone with Edo. She was even more surprised when Rovil stepped into the doorway. “Mr. Vik, how did—?”

“These are friends of mine,” Edo said. “Esperanza, this is Lyda Rose and Rovil Gupta.” Somewhere in the distance was a bass beat of music, and I was ninety percent sure that I wasn’t imagining it.

Esperanza nodded at us, then handed Edo a white towel and a sport shirt. “Sasha’s still in her room?” Edo asked her.

Dr. Gloria put a hand on my elbow. I became aware of the tightness in my chest, my tripping heartbeat.

Edo tugged the shirt down over his gut. “This way.” He led us into a vast, airy room. The ceiling slanted up to a peak thirty feet above us. A huge stone fireplace filled one wall, and a staircase led up to a railed balcony and the second-floor rooms. The sturdy furniture, I was pretty sure, had been constructed from the hulls of eighteenth-century battleships, then upholstered in buttery, deep-brown leather that could only be obtained from cows fattened on foie gras.

“Tell Rovil,” Dr. Gloria said. “This is how you decorate a house.”

Edo led us through an archway to a long corridor. The door at the end of the hall was ajar. The music blared from there, a heavy funk beat under a massive horn section. It sounded like a New Orleans marching band that had added a rank of synthesizers.

“Ten years old, and already a teenager,” Edo said, grinning. I could barely hear him. My eyes were fixed on the wedge of sunlight spilling from that door. A shadow flickered there, and I sucked in my breath.

Edo reached the door and pushed it open. The room was large and bright with windows on two sides, the desert sunlight blasting in. A skinny girl with a wild nimbus of red-brown hair danced in the corner of the room where the windows met, her back to us. She wore a lime-green T-shirt, multicolored tights, and a Hawaiian grass skirt. In front of her stood a large easel with a rectangle of white paper bigger than she was, three feet wide and four tall. The easel’s tray was full of liquid paints in shallow plastic cups. She held a paintbrush in each hand like drumsticks, dancing and painting at the same time, her little booty shaking that skirt, hands swiping and stabbing at the paper, throwing down colors.

She spun around, skirt fanning, droplets of paint flying—and stopped cold. She was a cartoon of shock: mouth agape, eyes wide, arms outstretched. No one moved for a long second.

Then something broke inside me. A bark escaped my body, a wild laugh, and then the laughter kept coming, tumbling out of me. My knees weakened and I nearly lost my balance. The dancing, the grass skirt, those paintbrushes!

I couldn’t stop laughing. Tears filled my eyes. The girl looked stricken, which only made the moment more hilarious. I didn’t know what was happening to me. My stomach began to cramp.

The girl looked up at Edo, then back to me. I kept thinking, She dances. My daughter dances!

I was past hilarity now and deep into some unlabeled emotional state, something roaring and chaotic. How does a wave feel when it crashes into the beach?

The girl (my daughter, my daughter who dances) stared up at me. She smiled tentatively, set the wet brushes on the floor, and touched my elbow. Dr. Gloria stood behind her, hands on her hips, waiting patiently for me to recover. Edo walked to the wall and did something that silenced the music.

I wiped at my eyes. “Whoa,” I said. I smiled to reassure the girl.

Rovil stared at me. “Are you okay?”

I had no idea what I was. Edo, though, seemed unperturbed. “Sasha,” he said, “this is Lyda Rose.”

She held out her hand. So polite. I took a stuttering breath, then took her hand in both of mine. I pumped officiously. “Pleased to meet you, Sasha.”

She nodded, equally mock-formal, in on the joke.

Edo said to Sasha, “Do you know who this is?”

She was staring at my hand. My left hand. Then she pirouetted away from me. The room was huge, much larger than the bedroom I’d grown up in. The queen-size bed was unmade, the bedclothes a riot of pinks and greens. Every wall that wasn’t a window was covered with her paintings and drawings. There were charcoal pieces like the one Eduard Jr. had shown me in Chicago, and pieces done in marker, but most were paintings on pages the size of the one on the easel, singing with color. The paintings looked like random swirls and stripes, but I began to see figures in them: an alligator in a red-checked suit; a fat woman holding a pink parasol; a parrot wearing a top hat, hiding in a tree. The pirate bear was a frequent subject—and there was the toy itself, a stuffed bear half buried in the sheets and blankets.

Sasha crouched and reached under the bed. She brought out a rolled-up page, then looked over her shoulder at me. I went to her and helped her unroll it.

In the center were two figures, holding hands. One woman was tall and thin with an imperious afro; the other shorter but with wild red hair that spiked in all directions like flames. Their outside hands were waving at us. The paint was bright, the paper unwrinkled. I thought it must be a recent piece.

Sasha reached for my left hand. She lifted it up so she could touch the ring there. Then she reached inside the neck of her shirt and drew out a necklace. Dangling from the end of it was a benzene ring—Mikala’s ring.