They were in his father’s car on the way home from piano lessons. “Your mother said you built something up there.”

Paul fought back a surge of panic. “I built a fort a while ago.”

“You’re almost twelve now. Aren’t you getting a little old for forts?’

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

“I don’t want you spending all your time up there.”

“All right.”

“I don’t want your grades slipping.”

Paul, who hadn’t gotten a B in two years, said, “All right.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence, and Paul explored the walls of his newly shaped reality. Because he knew foreshocks when he felt them.

He watched his father’s hands on the steering wheel. Though large for his age, like his father, Paul’s features still favored his Asian mother and he sometimes wondered if that was part of it, this thing between his father and him, this gulf he could not cross. Would his father have treated a freckled, blond son any differently? No, he decided. His father would have been the same. The same force of nature; the same cataclysm. He couldn’t help being what he was.

Paul watched his father’s hand on the steering wheel, and years later, when he thought of his father, even after everything that happened, that’s how he thought of him. That moment frozen. Driving in the car, big hands on the steering wheel, a quiet moment of foreboding that wasn’t false, but was merely what it was, the best it would ever be between them.

* * *

“What have you done?” There was wonder in John’s voice. Paul had snuck him up to the attic, and now Paul held Bertha up by her tail for John to see. She was a beautiful golden brindle, long whiskers twitching.

“She’s the most recent generation, an F4.”

“What does that mean?”

Paul smiled. “She’s kin to herself.”

“That’s a big mouse.”

“The biggest yet. Fifty-nine grams, weighed at a hundred days old. The average weight is around forty.”