She had, I would come to see, something of her father in her face — not his smile, not yet, but something in the shape of her looking, the way she took the world in.

I held my daughter, and I grieved my husband, and the two feelings did not fight each other the way I had feared they would.

They sat together, in the same chest, at the same time: the enormous grief of his absence, and the enormous joy of her arrival, and running underneath both, connecting them, the strange consolation that the same weeks that took him had given me her, and that he had spent his making sure she would be all right.

He never met her.

But he had loved her, fully, and prepared for her, and left her a letter.

She arrived, safe and whole and named, into a world that her father had, with the very last of his strength, made ready for her coming.