“Dad,” she said gently.

“What happened?” “It’s your mother,” I said, and I heard my own voice come out careful and thin.

Samantha went very still.

“What did she want?” I did not trust myself to summarize it, so I simply handed her the phone.

I watched her read it, watched her dark eyes move across the short message and then stop, the way mine had, on the one phrase that mattered.

“She said my new family,” Samantha noted quietly.