But their love, that night, expressed itself through the acceptance of his death, through the rituals of grief, through the collective agreement to begin letting go.

Chloe’s love expressed itself as an inability to let go at all, a stubborn, physical, insistent closeness, and that closeness, that unwillingness to accept the distance that death imposes, was what kept her looking when everyone else had turned their eyes to the machinery of mourning.

She did not save her father because she was clever.

She saved him because she loved him too much to stop looking at him.

And there is something in that I find almost unbearably beautiful: that the very intensity of a child’s love, the part of it that the adults were trying to gently manage and redirect, the part that looked like denial and shock and an inability to cope, was in fact the thing that saw the truth and brought her father back.