He put his hand there too, not touching my hand, not trying—only trying to understand what I was showing him.

“I like that, I like that philosophy, is what I mean…” he says. “I kind of think you could probably say the same thing about people. At the end of the day, one thing defines them.”

“What defines you?” I said.

“What defines you?” he said.

I smiled. “I asked you first.”

He smiled back at me. He smiled, that smile.

“Okay, fine,” he said. Then he didn’t hesitate, not for a second. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for my daughter.”

Sometimes You Can Go Home Again

We sit on the tarmac, waiting for the plane to take off. Bailey stares out the window. She looks exhausted—her eyes dark and puffy, her skin a splotchy red. She looks exhausted and she looks scared.

I haven’t told her everything yet. But she understands enough. She understands enough that I’m not surprised she is scared. I’d be surprised if she weren’t.

“They’ll come visit,” I say. “Nicholas and Charlie. They can bring your cousins if you want. I think that would be a nice thing. I think your cousins really want to meet you.”

“They won’t stay with us or anything?” she says.

“No. Nothing like that. We’ll have a meal or two together. Start there.”

“And you’ll be there?”

“For all of it,” I say.

She nods, taking this in.

“Do I have to decide about my cousins right now?” she says.

“You don’t have to decide about anything right now.”

She doesn’t say anything else. She understands—as well as she is allowing herself to integrate it—that her father isn’t coming home. But she doesn’t want to talk about it, not yet. She doesn’t want to navigate with me what things will look like without him, what they’ll feel like. That too doesn’t need to happen right now.

I take a deep breath in and try not to think about all the things that do have to happen—if not right now, then soon. The steps we’ll have to take, one after another, to move through our lives now. Jules and Max will pick us up at the airport, our refrigerator stocked with food for today, dinner waiting on the table. But those things will have to keep happening, day in and day out, until they start to feel normal again.

And there are things I can’t avoid happening, like the fallout coming several weeks from now (or several months from now), when Bailey is on her way to something like recovery, and I’ll have my first still moment to think about myself. To think about what I’ve lost, what I’ll never have back. To think only of myself. And of Owen. Of what I’ve lost—what I’m still losing—without him.