Think about Lily.

Think about our marriage.

Chloe!”

I did not answer him.

There was nothing left to say that would have meant anything, and I would not give my daughter the memory of her mother screaming in an airport.

I bent and lifted Lily onto my hip and turned her face gently into my shoulder so she would not have to watch her father led away, and I held her, and I breathed in the clean smell of her hair while behind me Julian’s voice grew fainter down the concourse and then was gone.

I have wondered, since, whether Lily heard any of it, whether some fragment of her father’s voice calling her name will surface in her someday, years from now, and need to be explained.