Someone will go looking.” She looked at me then, wet-eyed and wrecked and alive.

“And it was you.

Of course it was you.” We had spent a decade unable to give each other much of anything but grief.

And in one sentence, in a hospital at midnight, she gave me back something I hadn’t known I’d lost — the knowledge that whatever else had gone wrong between us, she had never doubted, not for one second in that dark car, that Maya’s father would come.

He would always come.

That was the one thing about me she had never stopped believing, and it turned out to be the thing that mattered most.