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He’s trapped me with her, and judging by the nothing at all in his face, he knows it. “I did.”

“Recently,” I say, and I smile at Sarah, and the smile is real, which is the worst part. “Very recently.”

“You’re pretty.” She takes my hand. Just takes it, small fingers cool in mine, sure of her welcome. “I’m Sarah. Are you coming to Nonna’s with us?”

My throat is parched. “I am.”

“Good.” She yawns wide, sways, catches herself on my hand as ballast. “My pills make me sleepy. Will you read to me before we go? Papa reads the voices wrong.”

“I read every voice wrong,” Lupo says with a smirk.

“You do Pip like a grown-up.” Sarah delivers this to me as evidence in an ongoing case. “Pip is a wren. She’s little.”

I’m holding the hand of a sick six-year-old who wants a bedtime story, and there’s a phrase for what I am now, and the phrase is sunk. “I’d love to read to you. I’ve been told my wren is excellent.”

“Story first, then plane,” Lupo tells her. “You’ll wake up flying.”

“Okay.” Another yawn. “But I want a Snickers.”

He sighs, and the sigh is domestic and long-suffering and nothing I’ve heard from him before. “You go on a flight, you get a candy. I didn’t forget our deal.”

I arch a brow at him over her head.

“Flying hurts her ears. Candy is the bribe we agreed to.”

So the man negotiates when it matters. Filed. Along with the sighing, and the honored deals with six-year-olds.

Sarah leads me out by the hand, and in the hallway we pass the man in the blue suit, stationed by a window, hands folded, and my grip tightens before I can stop it.

“Hi, Uncle Nick,” Sarah says, sleepy, unbothered, swinging our joined hands.

“Nap time, Sarah?” He inclines his head to her, then to me, and there’s something in his face when he looks at me. Not a warning. Closer to an apology, filed under professional constraints. “You know we’re flying soon.”

“I know.”

Uncle Nick. The man who showed me a gun this morning and said sorry about it. This fragile little girl walks past her father’s armed… whatever he is, and greets him with the ease of a kid seeing family. The gun came with an apology, the car ride with my exact breakfast order. None of it makes him safe, but it makes him something. He is a man who follows orders he didn’t much want.

Maybe I can use that.

Sarah’s bedroom is purple from ceiling to baseboard and very girly. Fairy lights under a canopy net. Birds everywhere. Wallpaper birds, a felt mobile turning slow over the pillow, and a poster of a cartoon flock I recognize from a dozen hospital rooms, big-eyed birds in little scarves.

“You like the Big Sky Birds?”

“You know them?” Instant resurrection. She hauls a stuffed wren off the pillow and presents it. “This is Pip. She’s the smallest, but she flies the farthest. Nobody can tell her where to go, because she’s a bird. Birds just go.”

“That’s why you like birds?” That’s why half my patients like them too.

“Uh-huh.” She climbs into bed and pats the space beside her, and I sit, and she arranges Pip between us with ceremony. “They fly wherever they want, and nobody bosses them. And they never get sick. You never ever see a sick bird.”

The true reason nobody sees a sick bird is a fact I will carry to my grave before I hand it to this child. “They’re very free.”

“When I’m big I’m going to see where Pip goes in winter. Papa says it’s Mexico. Uncle Nick says Florida.” She frowns at the injustice of adult disagreement. “Where do you think they go?”

Where do you think. Not how do I feel about it, or do I know. She wants to know what I think. It’s an adult’s phrase, worn smooth, handed back to me the same as it’s been handed to her a thousand times in a thousand rooms by strangers in scrubs. Kids who grow up in treatment learn adults early, all these interchangeable friendly giants with cold stethoscopes, and they either go silent around new ones or go easy. Sarah went easy. It tells the story of four years in one sentence, and it presses a thumb on something under my sternum.

“I think a wren would pick Mexico,” I say. “Better snacks.”

“That’s what I said.” She burrows down, pulls a purple comforter to her chin, and hands me the book with both hands, formal about it. “This one. Pip Flies at Night. You have to do her little.”