"Lily is still with us," she said at last. "She's being watched every second, and the team is doing everything it should be doing. But I don't want to tell you she's improving when I can't honestly say that."
Jack nodded once. He stared through the windshield toward the brilliant hospital doors, as if he could see through brick and glass to the small bed on the fourth floor. "Is she worse?"
Claire drew a slow breath. "Her heart isn't responding the way we hoped. The medications are helping her blood pressure, but they're not solving the problem. Dr. Shaw is reviewing the latest imaging with the overnight team right now."
For a moment Jack said nothing. Then he reached over, turned off the engine, and opened his door. The pickup gave a final mechanical shudder and settled into silence. "Then we should get back inside," he said.
Claire glanced at the lonely bus shelter. "Mr. Mercer, you don't have to—"
"Jack," he interrupted gently. "My name's Jack. And I know you need to get home. But if my little girl's heart is getting worse, I'm not staying out here."
Something warm and painful passed across Claire's face. She had assumed the man in the pickup wanted a woman alone on a deserted street. Instead he was a father trying to offer a stranger the small kindness he still had the strength to give. He did not ask for her apology, and that somehow made her want to give it more. "I was unfair to you," she said. "I'm sorry."
Jack stepped onto the snowy pavement and shut the door carefully. "You were alone at midnight," he replied. "I would've told my daughter to be careful too."
Together they walked toward the emergency entrance while the falling snow erased the tracks he had just made. Claire held the door for him, and Jack passed beneath the bright hospital lights with his hands deep in the pockets of his canvas jacket. He had come outside looking for an extra sweatshirt and a little air. He returned with neither, carrying instead the knowledge that the night ahead might be the hardest of his life.
Three days earlier, Jack had been standing in his kitchen, arguing with Lily about whether astronauts ate pancakes in space. She sat at the breakfast table in pink socks, an oversized green sweatshirt, and a paper crown she had made from the back of a cereal box. Her brown hair was pulled into an uneven ponytail that she had insisted on doing herself. The little gap between her front teeth showed when she smiled, and she smiled often enough that Jack sometimes forgot how much silence had lived in that house before she was old enough to fill it.