He didn’t need to ask what it meant.

His world and Ifeoma’s were already in the same picture.

That drawing told him more than any conversation could have, because Winnie did not say things; she drew them.

She had inherited that from Adanna, who had also been a person who put her heart into her hands rather than her mouth, and Emeka had learned over four years to read his daughter’s feelings in what she chose to render.

And what she had rendered, unprompted, was the merging of two worlds that had been separate: the power lines that meant her father, the ordinary working man with grease on his hands, and above them the satellite that meant Ifeoma, the woman from the impossible world of towers and boards and fortunes.

She had drawn them into a single frame, under the same dusk sky, as though the question of whether they belonged together had already been settled somewhere below the level of words, in the place where a ten-year-old keeps the truths she cannot yet say.