“How long?” I asked. I could barely get it out.

“Twelve hours.” His chest heaved, and I watched him fight to keep the breathing steady even as it broke, because she still needed the rhythm and he would not fail her even now.

“She lived twelve hours. And I wasn’t there. I was half a world away clearing a compound in the dark while my daughter fought her whole war — the only war she’d ever get — without her father there to hold her.”

He looked down at the baby on his chest, and his eyes were swimming.

“By the time they got word to me. By the time I got out of the mountains and onto a bird and halfway around the planet — it was over. Days over. I never held her. Not once. I never got to put my hands on my own daughter and tell her she wasn’t alone in it. I never got to take even one second of the pain off her.” He lifted his gaze to me, and there was something in it that was almost pleading, a man asking to be understood after twenty years of not being.

“My wife couldn’t look at me after that. I don’t blame her. The marriage came apart inside a year. The service discharged me a while later, after the fire, after — after a lot of things. And I have spent twenty years with these hands.” He raised one, scarred and shaking, an inch off the baby.