Denise helped arrange a meeting with a family counselor who worked with parents during prolonged hospitalizations. Jack initially resisted, certain that talking about his feelings while Lily was sick would be a form of selfishness. The counselor, a quiet man named Peter Lowell, asked what Jack would tell another father in the same situation. Jack immediately answered that he would tell the man to eat, sleep, accept help, and stop pretending fear was a failure.
Peter smiled. "How interesting. You seem to know exactly what a good father deserves when the father isn't you."
Jack stared at him. "That's a cheap trick."
"It's a very old trick," Peter admitted. "It still works sometimes."
They talked about Mara, about the accident, and about the promises Jack had made after her death. Jack admitted that he had spent four years keeping Lily close enough that he could hear every cough and every unexpected silence in the house. He told Peter about checking her breathing when she slept, about taking extra work to build an emergency fund, and about waking at night convinced a ringing phone meant he was about to lose the only family he had left.
"You carried grief as though it were a warning system," Peter said. "As if watching carefully enough could stop the next bad thing."
Jack rubbed his hands together. "It didn't work."
"It wasn't a foolish response to what happened. You were trying to keep your daughter safe. But you can't pay for safety with your own exhaustion forever. Lily still needs a father when she comes through this, not a man who has disappeared into the effort of preventing every possible danger."
Jack thought about the faded paper crown on the kitchen table. The last time he had seen it, Lily had been pretending to rule an imaginary planet where no one was allowed to be sad. He wondered what she would think if she could see him now, sleeping in hospital chairs and treating every hour as a test he might fail. He wanted to be brave for her, but perhaps the most honest version of bravery was admitting how badly he needed help.
On the first Sunday after the conversation, he agreed to drive home for a few hours. Luke remained at the hospital, and Leah promised to contact him immediately if anything changed. The drive through the quiet streets felt unreal. For two weeks Jack had moved among bright hallways, alert tones, and the constant presence of other people. Outside, children dragged sleds through a park, shoppers carried groceries, and a young couple laughed while scraping ice from their car windshield. The world had continued without asking his permission.
The house greeted him with a smell of wood smoke and the faint sweetness of the candle Mara used to burn in winter. Rose had watered the plants and collected the mail. Mateo had left fresh bread on the counter, and somebody had shoveled the front walk. Jack stood in the kitchen with his bag at his feet, looking at Lily's cereal bowl in the drying rack, the crooked paper crown still on the table, and the magnets she had rearranged on the refrigerator into an impossible sentence: THE MOON NEEDS MORE PANCAKES.