He gulped down his drink, poured another. Some might call it liquid courage, but it was never that for him. It was more like liquid memories. His muscles relaxed. Even his mind calmed a bit. He focused on those brown eyes as if they were his lifeline. Where to begin? “She’s having a replacement baby.”

Her eyes narrowed and she tilted her head, confused. “Replacement?”

Finally, he was ready to tell her everything. “Sheila’s new baby is going to replace the child we had.” He wasn’t making any sense to Annika, he knew it, but how did you tell someone that you had a beautiful girl at one time, but now you didn’t?

“You had a child...” Her voice drifted off, and then her eyes met his, and she gasped. Her next words were barely a whisper. “Daniel, what happened to your—”

“Sara.” However softly he spoke her name, it was still too loud for him. “She was five.”

“Was?” She walked toward him and stopped just two steps from him. Tears shone in her eyes. “Sara.” Her breath hitched.

At the sound of his daughter’s name on her breath, the sound of her surprise and sorrow, tears prickled at his nose. Tears he had never allowed before blurred his vision and clogged his throat.

“Beautiful name.”

Daniel nodded slowly. If he moved too fast, he would lose his mind. A tear escaped, falling directly to the floor as if even his own tears needed to escape his sorrow. He took another gulp of his bourbon and spoke. His first words had to fight the backlog of emotion in his throat. “She had curly brown hair and blue eyes, and she loved school.”

Annika smiled through her tears. “She looked like Sheila?”

He nodded, his mouth automatically forming a frown. “Except when she smiled.”

Annika nodded, knowledge in her eyes. “The dimples.”

“Yeah.” He could barely even whisper. Her smile had been a miniature version of his from the start. Everyone had commented on it. He had thrilled in seeing that little piece of him in another human being. In the end, it was the thing that he had come to avoid.

“She, uh...she had made a card for her teacher and wanted to go to school early to give it to her. Sheila said no, but I felt bad because the night before I had played only one song for her on the piano, instead of two, because I was tired.” Self-loathing overwhelmed him as it did when he thought of that second song. “I was such an ass. It would’ve taken three minutes to play that damn song, then I wouldn’t have felt guilty, and then...” He polished off his bourbon.