The pounding at the front door came again. “Carter!” the landlord shouted. “I’m serious now. You’re out today.”
Daniel ignored him.
He let the silence stretch between himself and Lily until it stopped feeling like a wall and started feeling like a bridge.
“I know you’re scared,” he said. “I know you think if we leave this place, we leave her behind. But listen to me very carefully. I am taking you somewhere your mother loved before she ever loved me. Somewhere she laughed as a little girl. Somewhere she knew she belonged. I should’ve done this sooner, and I’m sorry I didn’t.”
The bathroom door cracked open.
One blue eye stared at him—Sarah’s eye, not his.
“What place?” Lily whispered.
Daniel looked at his daughter, at the pinched face and the tear-swollen lashes and the wooden box clutched against her chest like a second heartbeat.
“The place where your mother began,” he said.
Lily opened the door the rest of the way.
