Then I walked over to my daughter.
She didn’t back away.She didn’t flinch.
She just stood there, shaking—not from the cold, and not from the four cracked ribs under her smock, but from the sudden, catastrophic realization that the mountain she had spent three years climbing was made entirely of ash.
I reached out and gently, carefully, wrapped my fingers around her bruised wrists.
Her skin was cold.Her pulse beneath the bone was running at a hundred and ten beats per minute, fluttering like a trapped sparrow.
“Your father loved you, Chloe,” I said softly, looking into the eyes that looked so much like his.“He loved you so much that he gave up his name, his country, and his life so that you would never have to learn how to clear a jammed slide in the dark.”
Tears welled in the corners of her swollen eyes, spilling over the dark, bruised flesh of her cheekbones, leaving clean, shiny tracks through the dried hospital grime.
