It just makes you start losing them before they’re even gone.”

He held her there at the curb for a long time, and he understood, in a way he had not quite let himself understand before, how much of his own fear he had passed down to her without meaning to.

Winnie had been six when Adanna died — old enough to understand that her mother was gone forever, young enough that the losing had shaped the way she loved everything after.

He had watched it happen in small ways over four years: the way she held herself a little apart from new friends, the way she flinched when he coughed, the way she had once, at eight, asked him with terrible seriousness whether he had gotten his checkups, as though she were already bracing to lose him too.

She had learned, the way children learn the deepest things, not from what he told her but from watching how he lived — and what she had watched was a father who kept the world at arm’s length, who had not gone on a single date in four years, who had built a small safe life for the two of them with the doors locked from the inside.

He had thought he was protecting her.