Chapter 1 — Fifteen Minutes

With fifteen minutes to go before the taxi arrived to take him to the airport, Marcus Vance realized that his business trip to Chicago could wait.

His black suitcase sat near the front door of his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

He had his suit jacket draped over one arm, his phone in the other hand, and his mind was somewhere over the Midwest already, rehearsing the presentation he had to deliver that afternoon, the slides, the numbers, the questions the board would ask.

He was, in every way that mattered, already gone.

That is the thing he would think about, afterward, again and again: how close he had come to being already gone.

Then Lily appeared, barefoot, from the hallway.

She was six years old.

And she did not say anything at first.

She simply ran toward him, and wrapped both arms around his waist, and buried her face against his shirt, and held on.

“Daddy,” she said, muffled against him.

“Don’t leave today.” Marcus smiled, on instinct, the automatic smile of a busy parent managing a child’s small clinginess on a travel morning.

“It’s only for two nights, sweetheart,” he said.

And he would have kept smiling, and kept his mind on Chicago, and picked up his suitcase and walked out that door to the rest of a very different life, if his daughter had not, in that moment, done one small thing.

She shook her head.

And then she looked toward the kitchen.

That single glance, that flick of a six-year-old’s eyes toward the next room, was the thing that made Marcus’s smile vanish, and made him, for the first time all morning, actually stop, and actually look at his child, and actually listen.

Chapter 2 — Don’t Leave Today