She stayed by her father’s side, and kept looking at his face, for the simplest reason in the world: because she loved him, and she was not ready to say goodbye, and she wanted to be near him for as long as she still could.

The vigilance was not a strategy.

It was love.

It was a little girl who could not bear to leave her father, and so did not leave, and stayed close, hour after hour, watching his face because it was her father’s face and she wanted to look at it.

And it was precisely that love, that refusal to detach, that put her in the one position from which the truth could be seen.

The adults loved Mark too, of course.