My father got up and approached the family hunched on the chairs. I couldn’t hear what he said to them, only the low murmur of his voice before he sat down. After that he hardly spoke at all. He sat with his elbows on his knees, his head cocked, listening.

“What’s he doing?” Jo muttered.

I swallowed. “I guess . . . being there.” Being present. He was good at that, with strangers.

When the other family got up to leave, the older woman hugged my father, tears in her eyes. “God bless you, Captain,” she said. “Are these your daughters?”

“Yes.” He turned, courteous as always, to introduce us. “Margaret and Josephine. My son-in-law, John.”

“Meg.” I held out my hand. “I hope your . . .” Mother? Father? Child? “I hope everything turns out.”

She hugged me, too. “Thank you, darling. Your father has been such a comfort. A real angel of the Lord.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

Wistfully, I watched as he walked with them to the elevator. There were more hugs, more murmurs, one of my father’s rare smiles. Hot pressure burned behind my eyes. I didn’t need him to be a saint or an angel. I just wanted him to act like a dad. What was missing in us, or in him, that made him go away? That made him available to everybody but us.

He resumed his post staring out the window at the dreary parking lot.

John put his arm around me. I rubbed my cheek against his sleeve, absorbing his solid warmth. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “I’ll buy you a candy bar.”

I nodded against his arm. “We’ll be right back,” I told Jo.

The hospital gift shop smelled like a fake, cold Christmas, like peppermint gum and pine cleaner. Small, chilled bouquets jostled for refrigerator space next to bottled drinks and waxy-looking fruit.

“What do you think?” I asked John, holding up a bud vase: four white rosebuds tied with red ribbon.

“I think you should wait until her surgery’s over before you buy her flowers.” He looked at my face. “Or we could get them now and they’ll be waiting for her when she’s admitted to a room.”

I held on to them like hope. “I want her to see them when she opens her eyes.”

“Sure. You want to get anything else? A book? Magazines?”

I shook my head. “Sometimes flowers are enough,” I said. Trying to tell him that I loved him. Thinking of the red roses on our kitchen island, waiting for me when I got home.

His warm, brown eyes met mine. “I can do better.”

My chest ached. He was trying so hard. I never wanted him to think our life together wasn’t enough for me.

Maybe I was afraid to hear it wasn’t enough for him.

“You don’t need to do better,” I assured him. “You don’t need to do anything.”

He frowned. “Meg . . .” His phone buzzed with another text. He fished it from his pocket and glanced at the screen. “We should get back.”