gone and let you move on.”
I closed my eyes.
“I told her maybe he was bluffing,” Andy went on. “She said he wasn’t. She knew her father.”
“What happened to my daughter, Andy?”
He broke then — one hand pressed hard over his mouth, his shoulders shaking once before he wrestled himself back under control.
“Hope was born three weeks ago,” he said. “Jennifer had a bleed after the delivery. They said they’d stopped it. They told us she was going to be okay.”
He stopped.
“She wasn’t.”
I couldn’t feel my own feet anymore.
“Before—” His voice cracked clean in half. “Before the end, she made me promise. If anything ever happened, Hope was to go to you. Only you.”
Behind me, Hope made a small, sleepy sound, and I reached back and touched her blanket with one finger without looking away from Andy’s face. When I finally did
