“Sweetheart,” he said, “your mother is not in these walls.”
A beat of silence.
Then the small voice came back, trembling. “Then where is she?”
He had no answer that didn’t sound like a lie.
He swallowed hard and leaned his forehead against the door. On the other side of it, his eight-year-old daughter was clutching that same polished wooden box she carried everywhere—the one filled with photographs, a silver bracelet, a dried flower, and every fragile scrap of her mother she had been able to save from the flood of time. Daniel had seen soldiers carry lighter burdens.