“Oh, come on,” I chide her. “Is that what you really think?”

“I don’t know. I figure he’s been looking forward to this day for a long time. Dad’s good with change.”

Meaning I’m not. And although he might be good with this particular change, there’s a part of him that has come unmoored. Dan loves Molly with both a consuming flame and a heart-pounding fear. Their complicated relationship has always been full of contradictions. Dan was in the delivery room when Molly was born on a cold February morning eighteen years ago, and the moment the baby appeared in all her pulsing, slippery, newborn glory, he wept, the tears soaking into the paper surgical mask they’d made him wear. The first time Molly was placed in his arms, he held the tiny bundle with the shocked immobility of abject terror. He hadn’t smiled down into the red, wrinkled face, not the way I did, instantly a mother, with a mother’s serene confidence and a sense of accomplishment so intense I was floating. He hadn’t cooed and swayed to that universal internal lullaby all mothers begin to hear the moment the baby is laid in their arms. He had simply stood and looked as though someone had handed him a vial of nitroglycerin.

Yet last night, I awakened to find him crying. He was absolutely silent, but the bed quivered with his fight to keep from making a sound. I said nothing, but lay perfectly still, helplessly drifting. Have I lost the ability to comfort him? Maybe I just didn’t want to intrude. We are each dealing with the departure of our only child in our own way. When you’re married, you don’t get to be let in, not to everything.

“Trust me,” I assure Molly. “He’s going to miss you like crazy.”

“He never said so.”

“He wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean he won’t be missing you every single second.”

“I guess.”

Too often, there’s a disconnect between Dan and Molly, despite the undeniable fact that they love each other. I pause, frowning at a knot that has formed in my thread. “That’s just the way he is,” I tell Molly. This is my role—the go-between, translating for the two of them.

I tease the knot loose and go back to my stitching. The border abuts a trapezoid-shaped swatch of neutral-colored lawn, snipped from the dress she wore to the eighth-grade banquet, the first grown-up dance of her life. At age thirteen she was impossible, taking drama to new heights and sullenness to new depths. I used to try to turn our dirgelike family dinners into something a little more upbeat. “What’s the highlight of your day?” I used to ask my husband and daughter. “What’s the one thing that makes it worth getting up in the morning?”

Dan had been grinding pepper on his salad in that deliberate way of his. Barely looking up, he said, “When Molly smiles at me.”

He startled both Molly and me with that remark. And our sullen, teenage daughter had smiled at him.