But then I thought about the lobby. The way he'd been sitting, with his elbows on his knees, shoulders carryingsomething invisible, the stillness of a man who'd spent so long braced for the worst that the bracing had become the posture. I'd known it was him before I'd seen his face. Twelve years and my body had recognised him anyway, some traitor reflex that hadn't gotten the memo. Like some part of me had never stopped looking.
Tom knocked on the door. "You eaten?"
"No."
"Come on then." He held it open. Easy and uncomplicated. Just Tom being Tom.
I picked up my bag and followed him out into the corridor, I said the right things over whatever we ate and listened when he talked and was, by any reasonable measure, present and fine.
I didn't think about Jack and Lily again until much later.
I was in bed, lights off, the apartment doing its quiet nighttime thing around me, and the thought came the way thoughts do when there is nothing left to keep them out.
Jack was back.
I didn't sleep for a long time.
Chapter Eighteen
Jack
"I'll be downstairs," I said. "Anything you need, just call me."
Lily looked up at me from the pillow. She'd gotten into bed without being asked, pulled the blankets up to her chin, and lay there with the rabbit tucked against her side like she was trying to take up as little space as possible.
I knew that posture. I'd worn it at her age, in a house that ran hot and cold depending on the day. But Lily had never had to learn it. Cassie had made sure of it.
Which meant the smallness was new. Which meant it was grief, not habit.
I didn't know which was worse.
"Okay," she said.
I left the door half open and the hall light on and came downstairs.
The house was quiet.
Not empty—just settled, holding its breath. I stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment. Lily's backpack was on the floor where she'd dropped it when we'd come in. She hadn't said much on the drive from the hospital. Hadn't said much getting out of the car, or coming through the front door, or movingthrough the rooms of her own house like she was visiting somewhere she used to know. She'd stopped in the living room doorway for a long moment, looking at the coloring book on the table, the scattered crayons. Then she'd gone upstairs without a word and I'd followed and that was that.
I didn't know if that was okay. I didn't know if any of this was okay. That was the thing I kept running up against—I had no idea what I was doing, and there was nobody left to ask.
I pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table.
What I knew about raising children was nothing. Less than nothing—I had an example and it was the wrong one. I knew how to pack a bag in eight minutes. I knew how to work a twelve-hour shift on four hours of sleep and a cup of bad coffee. I knew how to be alone, how to move through places without leaving a mark, how to make myself useful to people who'd forget me in six months and not mind that.
None of that was going to help the girl upstairs.
I pushed back from the table and stood there and didn't know what to do with myself.
The kitchen felt smaller than it had that afternoon. The walls closer. I could hear the house breathing around me, the fridge hum, the tick of something cooling somewhere, all the small sounds of a life I'd walked into without an invitation and was now supposed to keep running.
My father's voice arrived the way it always did.
Life does the math eventually. You end up where you end up.
I pressed my hands flat on the table.
The thing about my father's voice was that it never shouted. It didn't need to. It just settled in, low and even, and waited for you to run out of arguments. And standing in that kitchen at eleven o'clock at night with a grieving five-year-old asleep upstairs and no idea what I was doing, I was running out fast.