**Internal plan (not in output):**

He knocked at eleven o'clock.

Sophie had asked me three times in the hour before whether she should wear the necklace.

Each time I told her yes.

Each time she went back to the mirror to look at it, then came and sat beside me again.

When the knock came, she went very still.

"That's him?" she said.

"That's him."

She looked at the door.

Then she looked at me.

"Will you come with me?"

"I'll be right here."

She slid off the bed and walked to the door in her bare feet.

She was small for her age even before the illness.

Standing at that door, she looked smaller still.

She reached up and opened it.

Daniel was thinner than I remembered.

His face had the particular quality of someone who had been ill for a long time — not gaunt, exactly, but careful, as if he had learned to carry himself differently.

He was holding nothing.

He had come with nothing, which I thought was the right instinct.

He looked down at Sophie.

Sophie looked up at him.

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

Then Sophie said, "You have the same eyes as me."

Daniel's face did something complicated.

He crouched down so he was at her level.

"I do," he said.

"I noticed that too.

From photographs."

"Mama has photographs of you?"

He glanced at me briefly.

"Your grandpa does."

Sophie considered this.

"Grandpa never showed me."

"I asked him not to.

I wasn't ready." He paused.

"That was wrong of me.

I'm sorry."

Sophie looked at him for another long moment with the particular seriousness that she had always had, even as a toddler — the sense that she was measuring something carefully before she committed to it.

Then she stepped back from the door.

"You can come in," she said.

"But you have to take your shoes off.

Mama's rule."

Daniel looked at me over her head.

I nodded once.

He bent down and took his shoes off in the doorway, set them neatly to the side, and stepped into the room.

Sophie immediately held up the necklace.

"I'm wearing it.

Did you see?"

"I saw." His voice was rough at the edges.

"It suits you."

"I know." She sat back on the bed.

"Did you really find the shell on this beach?"

"A long time ago.

I was about twenty."

"That's very old."

"It felt young at the time."

Sophie laughed.

It was a small laugh, but it was real, and the sound of it went through me like something physical.

I sat in the chair by the window and watched them.

He was careful with her.

He didn't try to be too much too fast.

He let her lead — let her show him the view from the window, let her explain which parts of the ocean she liked best, let her tell him about her grandpa reading The Little Mermaid.

He listened the way people listen when they know they are running out of chances to listen.

At one point Sophie picked up the sealed envelope from the bed and held it out to him.

"Is this from you?"

"Yes."

"Can I open it now?"

He looked at me.

"That's up to your mama," he said.

Sophie turned to me with the envelope.

Her eyes were steady.

I thought about all the things I was still angry about.

All the months.

All the silence.