"—known."
The fire crackled. Sophie purred. Myfanwy frowned, blinking, and shook her head. In her lap was a copy of De Rerum Dirennis, closed around her index finger.
"Known what, sweetheart?" her father said from behind his desk. He had a book open in front of him, and his little round spectacles dangled from between his fingers. The lenses reflected the light of his reading-lamp, shining like the frames encircled miniature twin suns.
"I…I don't know…"
"Yes, and that's rather the problem, isn't it?" he said. "How can you know what you need to know, when you don't know what it is you know and what you don't know?"
"Dad. You're giving me a headache," Myfanwy said, grimacing.
He smiled a small, satisfied smile. "Good. I'd be worried if questions like this didn't tie your mind in knots."
For a time the three of them sat with their own thoughts in the warm half-light of the underground den. Finally Myfanwy removed her finger from the book and set it aside. Sophie yawned, her little white teeth gleaming in the firelight.
"Dad…"
"Yes, sweetheart?"
"Um." She bit her lip. "Dad, do you think it's ever…wrong, to know something? Or to want to know?"
"Are you speaking generally, or about something in particular?"
"I don't know. Maybe both."
He smiled that familiar little smile again—the same one she'd been seeing since the age of three, when she'd burned her hand on the oven and (after crying for a bit) turned to him from inside his arms and asked, Why?
"Well," he said, "let me ask you something in return. What is the specific reason you're asking—the one you clearly don't want to talk about?"
"Um."
"Is it wrong for me to ask? Knowing that it's private knowledge—knowledge that belongs to you—which you don't wish to share?"
The hand with which she'd been absently stroking Sophie stopped. "I don't know."
"What if I'm asking because I want to help you? If by gaining this knowledge, I were to use it to solve your problem? Would it be wrong for me to seek it, or to gain it without your consent, if in the future you were to be glad I did?"
"This sounds like philosophy again, Dad," Myfanwy said. "You know I hate philosophy."
"You're dodging the question."
"What about the opposite?" Myfanwy asked doggedly, ignoring him. "When you know something that belongs to someone else, but they don't? But it's something that could hurt them?"
A banging came on the door. Myfanwy's father's gaze turned sharp. "Hurt them, or hurt you?"
Myfanwy didn't answer. The banging continued.
"Myfanwy?"
"Hadn't we better go to dinner? Mum must be waiting…"
"Myfanwy."
"I don't know, all right?" Myfanwy said. "I don't know! Lately I feel like I don't know anything, and I can't trust anything, or…or…"
Myfanwy's father stepped out from behind the shiny old desk with the ornamental lion's feet and paced lightly across the room. He knelt down in front of Myfanwy so their eyes were level.
"What about me?" he asked. "Do you trust me?"
Red-gold flames danced in the glass of his spectacles. His smile was as warm as the fire at Myfanwy's back.
"Of course I do," Myfanwy replied.
"You didn't even have to think, then. That's the first time I've heard certainty in your voice. Why?"
Myfanwy frowned. Did he even have to ask? "Because—"