He opened the cupboard to put away a clean mug and found a jar of chocolate chips hidden behind the flour. Lily had written DAD DO NOT EAT in block capitals on a strip of masking tape. He sat down at the table and laughed once, a sudden rough sound that turned into tears before he could stop it. He cried for Lily, for Mara, for the ordinary mornings he had treated as guaranteed, and for the unbearable uncertainty waiting on the fourth floor of St. Catherine's.
When he finally stood, he went to the small room off the kitchen that Mara had used as an art studio. It had become Lily's workshop after Mara's death, a space filled with paper tubes, paint jars, scraps of fabric, and unfinished inventions that had no reason to exist except that Lily liked making them. On the floor, beneath a table cluttered with planets made from painted foam balls, stood a cardboard rocket nearly five feet tall.
Jack had forgotten about it. He and Lily had built the body from appliance boxes brought home from the shop, reinforced the seams with strips of wood, and painted the nose cone white. Lily had insisted on a purple control panel, three circular windows, and a button that would make a real sound when pressed. Jack had promised to finish the wiring for a harmless little battery-powered speaker, but he had been busy with the shop and kept postponing it.
He knelt beside the rocket and touched the unfinished window. There were pencil marks where Lily had written the names of imagined crew members: Commander Flops, Captain Lily, Dad, and Mama Star. The last name made him close his eyes. Mara would have loved the absurdity of a rabbit serving as the ship's engineer, and she would have spent the entire afternoon inventing voices for the crew.
Jack did not try to finish the rocket that day. Instead he photographed it carefully, from every side, and sent one picture to Luke with the message, Tell her we're still building. He took a shower, changed into clean clothes, made himself a proper meal, and packed a few things from Lily's room: a small framed family photograph, a paperback about the planets, and the music box Mara had given her on her fourth birthday.
Before leaving, he opened an old voicemail saved on his phone. It was a message Mara had left on an ordinary Tuesday years earlier, reminding him to buy milk and pick up Lily from preschool. Her voice was bright and impatient. At the end she said, "And stop working through lunch, Jack. We love you."
He had played the message many times after her death, searching it for something he had missed. That afternoon he heard it differently, less like a relic of the life he had lost and more like instructions for the life he still had.