There were two kinds of truths, good truths and hurtful ones. That was what her father’s attorney was telling her, and she was listening, doing her best, her face a small glazed crescent of light where the sun glanced off the yellow kitchen wall to illuminate her, but it was hard. Hard because it was a weekday, after school, and this was her free time, her chance to breeze into the 7-Eleven or Instant Message her friends before dinner and homework closed the day down. Hard too because her father was there, sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, sipping something out of a mug, not coffee, definitely not coffee. His face was soft, the lines at the corners of his eyes nearly erased in the gentle spill of light—his crow’s-feet, and how she loved that word, as if the bird’s scaly claws had taken hold there like something out of a horror story, Edgar Allan Poe, the raven, nevermore, but wasn’t a raven different from a crow and why not call them raven’s-feet? Or hawk’s-feet? People could …