“Mom?” my daughter asked, tugging gently at my hand.
I looked down.
Lily was eight, though sometimes, in moments like this, she felt older—not because she had grown, but because something inside her had shifted in ways children shouldn’t have to learn so early. She wore a soft lavender dress, one her father had picked out the year before at a clearance rack because he’d insisted it was “exactly her color,” even though he couldn’t have explained why. I had braided her hair that afternoon, slowly, carefully, replaying muscle memory I didn’t quite trust myself to have. He used to do it without thinking, his fingers steady in a way mine never quite were.
“Where do we go?” she asked, her voice quiet but steady.
I forced a smile that felt like it belonged to someone else. “Let’s find a spot first, okay?”
She nodded, though her grip on my hand tightened slightly as we moved deeper into the room, weaving past clusters of parents and children who seemed to belong to this moment in a way we didn’t.
Her father, Captain Marcus Hale, had been gone for nine months and three days.
