‘Derek,’ he said, his voice rougher than he intended.

‘And that’s Rosie.’

Cassidy smiled down at the baby.

It was not the bright, easy smile of someone trying to be liked.

It was tired and warm and careful with its tenderness.

Derek looked toward the sleeping child in the window seat across the aisle.

‘Is that your daughter?’

Cassidy nodded.

‘Harper.

She’s four.

She can sleep through turbulence, snack carts, and the collapse of civilization.

It took a lot of work to get here.’

Something in that answer loosened Derek enough that the words came before he could stop them.

He told Cassidy that Rosie was his first.

He told her Madison had died from a hemorrhage after giving birth.

He said it the way he always did now—plainly, as if the flatness of the sentence could keep other people from having to react too much.

He told her he was flying to Seattle because Madison’s parents had not held Rosie since the funeral and he had run out of reasons to say no.

Cassidy listened without interruption, one hand resting between Rosie’s shoulder blades.

When Derek finished, she looked out toward the dark oval of the airplane window for a long second, then back at him.

‘My husband died when Harper was nine months old,’ she said.

‘An aneurysm.

One minute he was making pasta.

Ten minutes later I was in an ambulance behind him, holding a baby who wouldn’t stop crying while a paramedic avoided my eyes.’ She glanced at Harper and smoothed the rabbit’s ear with her free hand.

‘For months after that, I held her like the world was waiting to take her too.’

Derek swallowed.

‘Did she cry like this?’

Cassidy let out a breath that was almost a laugh, but without humor.

‘Worse.

She screamed every time I tensed, which was always.

I thought she needed better bottles, different formula, more routines, less stimulation, more stimulation.

I bought every gadget the internet told me to buy.’ Her fingers gently traced the curve of Rosie’s back.

‘Then one day in a grocery store, after Harper had been crying for forty minutes and I was about two seconds from losing my mind, an older woman walked right up to me, took Harper out of my arms, and started rocking her near the freezer section.’

Derek blinked.

‘She just took your baby?’

‘Without asking.’ Cassidy gave him a sideways look that carried the smallest trace of mischief.

‘I hated her for three seconds.

Then Harper stopped crying.

The woman handed her back and told me something I’ve never forgotten.

She said, Babies borrow our nervous system.

If you are holding them like disaster is already here, they feel it.’ Cassidy paused.

‘I didn’t understand that sentence the day she said it.

Not really.

I just knew it was the first honest thing anybody had told me since Nolan died.’

Derek looked at Rosie’s sleeping face.

All at once he could see himself from outside.

The stiffness in his shoulders.

The breath he kept trapping high in his chest.

The way he hovered over Rosie at night and checked that she was still breathing until his own breathing turned shallow and erratic.

The way apology had become his default tone.

He had been holding his daughter as if