He sat in his car outside the closed door of that collapsing cottage and understood, with a completeness that made his hands shake, that the child on the other side of it had just rearranged every single thing in his life — and that he had missed the first three years of her because he had, one more time, in the one moment it mattered most, run.

Chapter 7 — Prove You Know How to Stay

He spent the night running the arithmetic he did not want to finish, and finishing it anyway, because the numbers were the numbers and he had never in his life been able to leave a number unreconciled.

The timeline was not ambiguous.

Lily was his daughter.

He found Mabel the next Sunday on a bench near the town square, watching Lily chase pigeons across the grass.