She looked at the blanket. “It’s crooked.”
“It’s a blanket, Naomi. It can be crooked.”
She sat down. The chair creaked beneath her. For several minutes they listened to a cart rolling past in the hallway. Naomi wanted to talk about plans, schedules, appointments, and any other subject that allowed her to believe the coming weeks could be managed if she only worked hard enough.
Daniel reached for her hand.
“Talk to me,” he said.
“About what?”
“About whatever you’ve been keeping behind that face all day.”
She smiled faintly. “It’s my regular face.”
“It’s your briefing face. I married the woman behind it.”
She looked toward the window. “I’m afraid.”
“I know.”
“I keep thinking there must be something else I can do. Somebody else I can call. Another treatment we haven’t tried, another person who knows more than the people here.”
Daniel squeezed her hand, though the effort made him tired. “You’ve asked every question. You’ve listened to every answer. You’ve taken good care of me.”
“It doesn’t feel like enough.”
“I know that too.”
She stared at the coffee cup. She had led trained people through dangerous situations where plans went wrong and decisions had to be made in seconds. In those places, uncertainty was a problem to solve. Here she could not make a decision that changed the central fact. The man she loved was dying, and no amount of discipline could negotiate the outcome.
Daniel let her sit with the truth. Then he spoke about Khloe.
“She’s going to want to keep everything,” Daniel said. “The stuffed rabbit, the pink sweater, the drawings in the kitchen. She’ll be scared that if she forgets one small thing, she’s forgetting me.”
Naomi nodded. She recognized the fear because she already felt it.
“Don’t rush her,” Daniel continued. “When she needs a new sweater, buy her one. When she needs a new bike, let her have it. Don’t make her choose between remembering me and growing up.”
She had not expected the advice. She had assumed Daniel would want her to keep the objects that belonged to him exactly as they were.
“What if I don’t know how?” she asked.
“Then you learn. You’ve learned harder things.”
“Not more important things.”
He smiled. “There you go. That’s the right answer.”
They sat in silence for a while. Daniel told her he wanted Khloe to keep going to school, to have friends, to argue about which shoes to wear, and to be allowed to experience the small ordinary disasters of childhood without every adult looking frightened. He did not ask Naomi to make the world harmless. He asked her to make it a place where their daughter felt able to tell the truth.
“She’ll make mistakes,” Daniel said. “She’ll break something. She’ll say the wrong thing. She’ll be unfair sometimes. That’s how children learn. Promise me you won’t make her feel that being loved depends on never getting anything wrong.”
Naomi bent her head. “I promise.”
“And promise you won’t shut everyone out.”
She looked up. “Daniel—”
“I’m serious. You can be very good at handling difficult things by yourself. But Khloe isn’t a mission. She’s a little girl. She needs more than one person in her corner.”
She thought of Marcus and the friends who had continued calling after he left the service. He thought of Daniel’s sister, who offered to take Khloe on weekends and worried that Naomi would refuse every offer of help because accepting it felt like an admission of weakness.
“I’ll try,” she said.
Daniel shook his head gently. “That’s not a promise.”
She took a breath. “I’ll let people help us.”
“Good.”
His eyes closed for a moment. The room became quiet enough that Naomi could hear a muffled laugh from the nurses’ station. When Daniel opened his eyes, he looked at her with the expression he used when he was about to say something she would spend years understanding.
“You know what I want most?”
“Tell me.”
“I want her to remember you coming home. Not your old rank. Not the stories people tell about what you could do. I want her to remember you at the kitchen table, making awful pancakes and listening when she talks about something that matters to her.”
Naomi laughed through a sudden tightness in her throat. “My pancakes aren’t awful.”
“They’re dreadful.”
“She likes them.”
“She likes the blueberries. You could put blueberries on cardboard and she’d eat it.”
They laughed together, and the laughter hurt in the best and worst possible ways. It reminded her of everything they had shared and of how little control they had over what remained.
