On the pond beside Hospital Aliança da Bahia, a flock of white herons descended petal-like onto the water. It was the second day that Raquel had come to watch them. There was a bench on the other side of the pond, but a thin gray-haired man was already perched there with a book, and the last thing she wanted to do was get any closer to books and the people who bothered with them. When they got back to Rio, everyone she knew was going to be talking about what Rocha had published and—unless he could buy an end to Flamenguinho—the possible kidnapping of his partner.

To get the book printed in two days and into a handful of select stores, Rocha had paid an exorbitant sum. She didn’t think the title he’d chosen, After the Alley, was what her mother would have selected, but maybe it was better. Her mother’s titles had always embarrassed her with their intentional mistakes of the senses: Have You Tasted the Butterflies, The Warm Green Sound of Your Sleeve. As if her mother thought there was something beautiful about errors and being mistaken. But what was beautiful about accidentally shooting her brother in an alley, or her mother gambling money she didn’t have? What was beautiful about the scabbed-over hole on the side of Marcus’s head?

She wanted to call Thiago but didn’t feel up to hearing his jokes about her aim. Across the pond, the old man on the bench was hunched intently over his book, so absorbed that it was as if he had willed his whole being into the pages on his lap. Her mother had read with that kind of abandon. Raquel had never been able to. She’d had too many reservations about giving herself over that way, risking that some book might obliterate her carefully constructed sense of who she was.

Yet a book had done that anyway, and she’d been the one to print it off the computer. She’d put it into Rocha’s hands, and now everyone she’d ever met was going to know she wasn’t supposed to have happened. How long had it taken her mother to find that error beautiful, or at least the daughter who had come of it?

Raquel reached into her bag for her phone as if the right question might make it ring.