And just before Jason left, she got up and handed him a piece of paper with a blue cat on it, wordlessly, and he took it and tucked it very carefully into his jacket pocket like it was made of glass.

Claire watched that small transaction from the kitchen and had to turn away and busy herself with nothing for a moment.

She knew what it had cost her daughter to hand over that drawing — knew that Zoe had spent months not giving her father anything, holding herself just out of his reach as a kind of self-protection, and that the blue cat was the first small thing she had risked.

She knew, too, that Jason understood it, because of the way he’d handled the paper.

A year ago he would have said thank you, sweetheart and folded it into a pocket and forgotten it by the car.

The man who tucked it away like it was fragile was someone who had finally learned the price of the thing he was being given, which was the only reason Claire was letting any of this happen in her home at all.