He knelt on the floor outside the bathroom.
“Lily,” he said quietly, “open the door.”
“No.”
He heard her shifting around in the tub. She had been sleeping there some nights, curled up in one of Sarah’s old cardigans because, as she had whispered once in the dark, it still smelled like her if you held it close enough.
Daniel closed his eyes.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “your mother is not in these walls.”
A beat of silence.
Then the small voice came back, trembling. “Then where is she?”
He had no answer that didn’t sound like a lie.
He swallowed hard and leaned his forehead against the door. On the other side of it, his eight-year-old daughter was clutching that same polished wooden box she carried everywhere—the one filled with photographs, a silver bracelet, a dried flower, and every fragile scrap of her mother she had been able to save from the flood of time. Daniel had seen soldiers carry lighter burdens.
