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made it easy to forget that upstairs, a window was open to the wintry afternoon. In fact, if the recipe was particularly challenging, Leah could forget, for a moment, for the time it took to mince an onion, say, or clarify a stick of butter, that things were not as simple as adding flour to melted butter and stirring to make a roux, and then adding stock and watching it thicken. In real life, in her real life, equations were not that simple. Not that straightforward. Definitely not that dependable.
    Once the day’s cooking was done, once the soufflé was sitting on the counter, waiting for Charlotte to come over and eat it, once the cookies were packaged up and put in the freezer in the hopes that some day soon Leah would feel like eating them, once the sun started to sink in the western sky, that’s when Leah felt it the most. Felt the cold streaming in through that open window. Felt the exhaustion that came not with a day well spent on hard work, but rather with the endless fretting and planning and scheming she did around the notes, and the birds and the whole damn project.
    What she was really doing, she knew, what was really wearing her out as she lay there on the couch, was simply waiting for Nathan to come back or go on. Waiting for it to happen, waiting to know it had.Straining to feel him around her, or feel him leave. She knew, by now, that he was at the library. Knew it the way she’d known he was missing in the first place. She wished she could be sure he was getting the messages — that he was receiving them and understood what they meant. She wished he’d send just one note back, just one word, even, scrawled on a piece of cigarette package, a grease spotted paper bag that had once held french fries, anything that would let her know she was hitting the mark, that he understood she was sorry, that he understood what he was and what he had to do. But there had been no message from him, and so far, there was no way for her to know if she was getting through to him. She closed her eyes and concentrated, but still, she felt nothing. Eventually her breathing turned deep and even and she was asleep again.
    * * *
    As he crunched across the darkening Common, Henry felt his pockets for a cigarette. Fuck. He’d left them at home. Whatever. He’d just buy another pack downtown. He felt for his wallet. Double fuck. That was at home, too. He stopped short, sighed deeply. He jammed his hands down into his cold leather pockets, turned around and trudged back to the house.
    * * *
    Nathan sat on the library steps; the bird perched beside him. He patted her head and dreaded the moment she’d take wing again and leave him. He thought about the collection of little paper animals piling up in the bushes against the library. He didn’t pretend to understand what was going on. All he knew was that each day, the bird arrived. And each day, the kid in the parka took a brightly coloured paper animal off its leg and hid it in the bushes. And then he took off, but the bird hung around, flying over to Nathan where he paced near Winston Churchill, or hopping around beside him where he rested on the steps. They spent an hour or more a day together, just sitting, enjoying each other’s company.
    And then, once the bird took off too, Nathan would tuck himself in between the bushes and the library and look at that day’s arrival. So far, there was an orange fish, a red monkey, a green cat and a goldbird. Today’s delivery had been a blue frog. There was something so familiar about the forms. He imagined they must mean something, taken all together, but he couldn’t think what, much less could he figure out who might be sending them or for whom they were intended. The kid in the parka didn’t seem very interested in them. The most he did was hide them away.
    But there was something about their shapes that soothed Nathan, their simple paper lines, the love they seemed to emanate. And anyway,