"I want to say—you don't have to say anything else. To me or to anybody at the university. Do you understand? I'm not going to write anything down about this. As far as the program is concerned, you were unable to travel for personal reasons, and that's all it ever needs to say."
"Okay."
"Are you safe? Right now? Are you somewhere safe?"
That one surprised me. I looked around at the pond and the heron and Mr. Quennell's brass plaque. "I'm at a park," I said. "I'm fine. I'm just—I'm sitting on a bench."
"Okay." I heard her breathe out. "Maya, I have been doing this for nineteen years. I read every one of those four hundred essays myself. I'm going to tell you something I'm not supposed to tell applicants, which is that yours was the one I read out loud to my husband. The drought on Daphne Major. The birds that didn't choose." She stopped. "I suppose that lands a little differently this morning."
I laughed. It came out of me like something breaking. "Yeah," I said. "A little."
"I'm going to call the young man on the waitlist," she said. "I have to. You understand. The seat has to go to somebody or it goes to nobody, and I won't let it go to nobody. But I'm going to call him after I've thought for an hour. I want to think about what we can do. I'm not promising anything. I don't know what there is. But I'm not going to just close the file on you. Will you answer if I call you back?"
It was the same thing my father had said. Answer if I call.
"Yes," I said.
"Good. And Maya? Go easy on the people who told you. Or don't. You get to decide that. But I've been at this a long time, and I've met a lot of parents, and I have found that it is very rare for a family to keep a secret that size for any reason other than terror."
When I hung up, Yusra was standing about ten feet away on the path, with her bike on its side in the grass and a paper bag from the Colombian bakery on Main Street in one hand, and her face doing something complicated.
"I didn't hear much," she said. "I swear. I heard 'if I leave, I can't come back.' That's it."
"That's kind of all of it."
She came and sat next to me on Mr. Quennell's bench. She put the bag between us. Neither of us opened it. Yusra is not a quiet person, which is one of the reasons I love her. She talks with her hands and sometimes with her whole body, and she has an opinion about everything, and she is usually right, which is annoying. Now she sat on the bench with her hands pressed between her knees and didn't say anything at all for almost a whole minute, which I think is a record.