Maya went out into the garden and stood there.

After that, the house had a boy in it.

It did not happen all at once — for the first week he spoke maybe forty words a day, and there were days he didn’t at all — but it came back the way water comes back into a dry riverbed, in the low places first.

By the end of the month he was talking to Maya constantly and to Harrison most evenings and to nobody else at all, and a specialist named Dr.

Yeboah came out to the house and said that this was not just progress, it was the good kind of progress, and that they should now, carefully, begin the actual work.