"Hasn't moved."
"Okay. Let's go up."
We took the stairs quietly, Jack ahead, me behind. I watched the way his boots hit the wood—heavy, but careful. He pushed the door open and stood back, and I went in.
She was on her side, facing the wall, one arm thrown out. I knelt next to the bed and put my hand to her forehead. She was still burning, the heat dry and heavy, but no worse than what Jack had described on the phone. Her breathing was even, a rhythmic puff against the pillow. I checked the glands in her neck, her color, the steady rise and fall of her chest. Everything where it should be.
I reached for her shoulder, just a light touch to the fabric of her pajamas. "Lily." My voice was barely a whisper, a sound I hadn't used in years. "Hey, sweetheart."
She stirred, turning toward me with the slow, underwater movement of a child submerged in sleep. Her eyes didn't quite open, just fluttered against the weight of the fever. I kept my hand on her forehead, smoothing her hair back from her face, and she made a small, broken sound. Then her hand came up, searching the air, and found mine.
She held it.
Just that. Her small, hot fingers closing around my thumb in the dark, not knowing who I was, just reaching for the only solid thing in the room.
I stayed completely still. My skin was still cool from the rain outside, and I could feel her fever pulsing against my palm.
She had Cassie’s hands. The same long, tapered fingers, the same curve of the nail. Five years old and she’d lost everything, and now she was holding onto a stranger in the dark because I was the only thing there. I didn't move. I didn't look at Jack, though I could feel him like a physical weight in the doorway. After a moment, her grip loosened, her fingers sliding away as she slipped back under the surface of the fever.
I moved into the light of the hallway lamp to dose the Tylenol. I was careful, precise, getting the liquid into her without fully breaking her sleep. She took it without protest—a small, instinctive swallow that told me she’d done this before. She’d had a mother who knew how to sit in the dark and do this.
I set the bottle on the nightstand with a quietclick.
In the doorway, Jack watched. He didn't offer to help; he didn't say a word. He just stood there, shadowed and silent, witnessing the part of Lily's life he hadn't been there for.
I pulled the blanket up to her shoulder, smoothing the edge, then stood. My knees protested the movement. Without looking at him, I walked toward the door, and we went downstairs.
* * *
He put the kettle on without asking. I sat at the kitchen table and looked past him into the living room.
From here, I could see the coffee table and the coloring book still spread out across it. It was a shock of bright, aggressive color in a house that felt otherwise drained—half a garden filled in with jagged strokes of pink and yellow. A few crayons had rolled onto the rug, left exactly where they’d fallen.
It looked like a crime scene of a normal afternoon. He was living around the mess like it was a memorial he didn't have the permission to dismantle.
He set a mug in front of me and sat across the table. For a moment, neither of us said anything. The only sound was the rising hiss of the kettle and the rain against the window over the sink—the one Cassie had always meant to replace.
"Coming back here," he said, nodding toward the window. "After Baltimore. Was it what you expected?"
"I… I suppose." The truth was, I had expected nothing. I'd come to work, and work was what I did.
He nodded. His hands were around the mug—broader than I remembered, roughed up from years of whatever work he’d been doing. I noticed a scar on the back of one knuckle I didn’t recognize.
"You like it?"
"I do. Good hospital." I paused, looking into the steam of my drink. "Quiet enough."
He turned the mug in his hands, a slow, deliberate circle. It was the same restless habit he’d had at nineteen, but his hands were different now—calloused, the skin etched with the kind of deep-set grit that doesn't wash off in one go.
"Cassie mentioned you’d done it," he said. "The surgeon thing." He didn't look up, but his voice had a rough edge to it. "She was proud of you."
I stared into my mug, the steam dampening my face.
"Talked about you more than you’d think," he added.
The guilt hit me, sharp and familiar. I thought of the unreturned calls and the coffee shop curb. The photo of Lily I’d tucked into a drawer and eventually buried under hospital paperwork. I’d spent years convincing myself that staying away was a form of moving on, but sitting across from him, it just felt like a long-running cowardice.
"What happens now?" I asked. I needed to move the conversation away from Cassie before my throat closed up. "For you."