The "beautiful" ( Chicago Sun-Times ) novel from the prizewinning author of Come Together, Fall Apart and The Great Divide. Miraflores has never known her father, and until now, she’s never thought that he wanted to know her. She’s long been aware that her mother had an affair with him while she was stationed with her then husband in Panama, and she’s always assumed that her pregnant mother came back to the United States alone with his consent. But when Miraflores returns to the Chicago suburb where she grew up, to care for her mother at a time of illness, she discovers that her mother and father had a greater love than she ever thought possible, and that her father had wanted her more than she could have imagined. In secret, Miraflores plots a trip to Panama, in search of the man whose love she hopes can heal her mother—and whose presence she believes can help her find the pieces of her own identity that she thought were irretrievably lost. What she finds is unexpected, exhilarating, and holds the power to change the course of her life completely. In gorgeous, shimmering prose, Cristina Henríquez delivers a triumphant and heartbreaking first novel: the story of a young woman reconciling an existence between two cultures and confronting a life of hardship with an endless capacity to learn, love, and forgive. Cristina Henríquez  is the author of  Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories, The World In Half  and the forthcoming novel  The Great Divide . Her stories have been published in  The New Yorker ,  Glimmer Train ,  Ploughshares ,  TriQuarterly , and  AGNI , and her non-fiction has appeared in  The New Yorker ,  The Oxford American , and  Preservation . She was featured in  Virginia Quarterly Review  as one of "Fiction's New Luminaries," and is a recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award, a grant started by Sandra Cisneros in honor of her father. She earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She lives with her husband in Chicago. Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication   One - Origination Two - Orientation Three - Absorption Four - Deflation Five - Infiltration Six - Concretion Seven - Saturation Eight - Friction Nine - Crystallization Ten - Erosion Eleven - Vibration   Acknowledgements ALSO BY CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ Come Together, Fall Apart RIVERHEAD books Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England   Copyright © 2009 by Cristina Henríquez All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada   Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data   Henríquez, Cristina, date. The world in half / Cristina Henríquez. p. cm. eISBN : 978-1-101-02865-0 1. Panama—Fiction. I. Title. PS3608.E565W 813’.6—dc22       This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.   While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. For Ryan One Origination M ore than three thousand miles below the surface of the earth is its core. It’s taken scientists a long time to learn anything about it. Most of them would readily admit that they know more about every other planet in the solar system than they do about the pit that’s at the center of ours. But seismic waves have taught us a few things. There’s a liquid outer core and a soli