Lila was calmed to the core. The truth about her father remained unchanged. He was, and always would be, the man she grew up believing him to be. The man willing to move the sun and the moon for the sake of his girl. Sure, he moved the sun too close and scorched the moon in the process. He wasn’t perfect. He was a criminal. But the man wasn’t evil.

Interesting too that his long-term memory was largely undisturbed. Though, she’d researched enough about Alzheimer’s in the past months to know the past was usually the last thing to go.

What stuck her after he’d finished his story, however, and she’d thought very little of it at the time, was that her mother had bought her another bike. Not three months after the accident, which – the doctor was right –Lila did not remember. They’d been on Yonge Street, passing the huge Canadian Tire store, so white and red and out of place in charming, upscale Rosedale. There in the parking lot, with lavender streamers waving from the handlebars was a white girl’s bicycle with purple racing stripe along the frame.

If she’d known, if her parents had told her about the accident and explained she was not to ride a bike until the following spring, if they’d revealed where on earth her own bike had gone, Lila wouldn’t have begged. She wouldn’t have crossed her arms, dropped down on the hot pavement right there in the stream of Torontonians flowing in and out of the store, and announced she wanted that bike more than anything else on earth.

Then Elisabeth, being Elisabeth, wouldn’t have pulled out her wallet and said, “Then you’ll have it. No child should be without a bike.”

Elisabeth and her hippie parenting.

It was against the hospital’s orders. Victor, being Victor, was far too paranoid to let her risk another fall. Maybe he’d planned it, maybe he’d snapped, but he grabbed Lila and fled.

He thought he was saving her life.