Reed smiled.
“I have to leave by three fifteen.”
“I know.”
Everybody close to Reed knew three fifteen.
Southgate Elementary released students at three twenty-eight.
Reed tried to be in the pickup line before the doors opened.
He had missed it twice in six years.
Once because a snowstorm closed Interstate 55.
Once because his truck battery died in a warehouse parking lot and he had needed to call Nora to pick Juny up.
He remembered both occasions more clearly than Juny did.
That morning he packed turkey on wheat, apple slices, the last strawberry yogurt, and a packet of pretzels into Juny’s lunch bag.
Then he wrote:
LOVE YOU BIGGER THAN THE MISSISSIPPI.
He folded the note into a crooked star because Juny had recently decided ordinary rectangles were lazy.
She came downstairs wearing one purple sock and one gray sock, her dark curls sticking out from a braid Reed had attempted to make symmetrical.
“Dad.”
He looked up.
“That voice means criticism.”
“You made the left braid fat.”
“I believe the technical term is structurally reinforced.”
“It looks weird.”
“Also a technical term.”
Juny rolled her eyes and grabbed her lunch.
Before leaving, she reached into the pocket of her winter coat and pulled out a tiny plastic horse with a chipped blue saddle.
“Henry goes with you today.”
Reed frowned at the toy.
“Henry looks underqualified.”
“He’s brave.”
“Based on?”
“He survived the vacuum cleaner.”
“That is significant.”
She placed the horse in his palm.
“For luck.”
Reed tucked it into the inside pocket of the canvas jacket Laya had bought him twelve years earlier at a farm-supply store outside Belleville.
The zipper pull had broken long ago and been replaced with a bent paperclip.
Juny had asked him twice to buy a new jacket.
He always said this one still worked.
The truth was simpler.
Laya had bought it.
Some objects become expensive because replacing them costs too much emotionally.
Laya Harland had been thirty-six when she died.
No warning.
No long illness.
No final months in which everyone knew what was coming.
She woke one Saturday with what she described as the worst headache of her life.
By the time the ambulance arrived, she was barely responsive.
A ruptured cerebral aneurysm.
Surgery.
Machines.
Two days of impossible waiting.
Then Reed sat beside a hospital bed while a neurologist used careful words to tell him there was nothing left medicine could recover.
Juny had been four.
For nearly a year after Laya’s death, Reed functioned through alarms and lists.
Wake up.
Make breakfast.
Find socks.
Work.
Answer school.
Buy groceries.
Cook.
Bath.
Story.
Door locked.
Lights off.
Repeat.
Grief had no schedule, so he built one around it.
He had once lived a life filled with missions, travel, secure facilities, technical response teams, and problems people called urgent because entire organizations were waiting on the answer.
After Laya died, urgent became different.
Urgent was a fever at two in the morning.
A school nurse calling about wheezing.
A forgotten science project due Friday.
A ten-year-old crying quietly because everyone else at the mother-daughter breakfast had a mother.
Reed stopped caring whether his work looked impressive.
He cared whether it ended by three fifteen.
That choice confused people who knew parts of his past.
They assumed someone with his technical experience should want management.
Consulting.
Security architecture.
Government contracting.
Reed wanted predictable invoices, enough money for rent, and a schedule that put him in the elementary-school parking lot before Juny walked out.
He worked independently.