on the plane so Derek could learn the actual melody.

One evening Derek sent back a video of Rosie, serious and determined, banging a wooden spoon against her high chair tray like a tiny union organizer demanding better conditions.

Cassidy replied with three laughing emojis and a message that said, She looks exactly like a child who will someday run a city council meeting.

The ease of it startled him.

It had been months since an adult conversation with someone outside daycare pickup or work had felt light.

By winter, the two of them had settled into a quiet, irregular friendship built in fragments.

Cassidy was a public library assistant and did copyediting at night after Harper went to sleep.

Derek sent her pictures of snow on the Chicago sidewalks.

She sent him recordings of Seattle rain against her apartment windows.

They talked about practical things first—sippy cups, sleep regressions, whether children’s Tylenol should be sold with apology notes for parents.

Then, carefully, they talked about grief.

Cassidy admitted that for the first year after Nolan died, she could not hear pasta water boiling without feeling sick.

Derek confessed that he had not yet listened to Madison’s favorite violin concerto all the way through because the second movement made his chest feel uninhabitable.

On the first anniversary of Madison’s death, Derek took Rosie to the lakefront at sunrise.

He carried a thermos of coffee, one pink blanket, and the courage Dr.

Alvarez had been helping him build for months.

He sat on a cold bench with Rosie bundled against him and told her about her mother out loud.

He told her Madison laughed before her own jokes were finished.

He told her she played violin when she needed to think.

He told her she had a tiny scar on one knee from falling off a bike at thirteen and a habit of singing grocery lists under her breath.

Rosie chewed on the zipper of his jacket and looked up at him with solemn gray-blue eyes.

Derek cried, but he did not hide it.

When he got home, he sent Cassidy a message that read, I said Madison’s name to Rosie today without feeling like the floor opened.

Cassidy answered, That’s not a small thing.

That’s a door.

A few weeks later, during one of their longer late-night conversations, Cassidy told him the rest of the grocery store story.

The older woman who had taken Harper was named Mrs.

Jean.

She was a retired NICU nurse buying frozen peas and vanilla ice cream.

After Harper calmed down, Mrs.

Jean looked Cassidy dead in the eye and said, Grief makes us hold too tight.

Babies need love, not alarm.

Then she squeezed Cassidy’s shoulder and walked away before Cassidy could ask another question.

‘I thought she was impossible,’ Cassidy told him.

‘Then I spent the next year realizing she was right.’ Derek laughed softly and said, ‘So you became the terrifying stranger from the produce section.’ Cassidy laughed too.

‘Exactly.

I just upgraded the setting to row fourteen at thirty-seven thousand feet.’

Spring came.

Rosie learned to clap, then to point, then to toddle sideways along the couch with the concentration of a tiny mountain climber.

Harper began insisting on FaceTiming Rosie so she could show her important things: a missing crayon,