Chloe was the only one who had not closed the question.

She did not care about the signed document, or the doctor’s authority, or what everyone had agreed was true, or the fact that eight-year-olds are supposed to defer to the certainties of adults.

She did not know she was supposed to give up.

She simply loved her father enough to stay close to him, and to keep looking at him, and to refuse to say goodbye until she was certain, truly certain, in her own eyes and her own ears, that he was gone.

And because she never stopped looking, she saw the thing that was there to be seen, the thing the rest of us had stopped being able to see the moment we accepted that it was over.