We sit like that for a few minutes. Comfortable. Quiet.
Then she says, without preamble, "Are you going to be here forever?"
I keep my eyes on the seam. "What do you mean by here?"
"Silver Mesa," she says. "With us." A pause. "With Dad."
I take two more careful stitches.
She waits with the patience she's learned from somewhere, the willingness to sit in a question without rushing it. Definitely something she gets from her father.
"That's the plan," I say carefully.
She looks at the bandana in my hands. "Dad has a plan too," she says. "A big one. I'm not supposed to know about it but I heard him talking to Silas." She says this with the matter-of-fact honesty of a child who considers eavesdropping a neutral activity rather than a transgression. "It's a good plan."
I look at her. "Maisie. You shouldn't eavesdrop."
"I know," she says.
Completely unbothered.
"But it's a really good plan."
I go back to the seam.
She swings her boots against the porch step in her comfortable rhythm. Rowdy is asleep in the yard below us in a patch of afternoon sun, twitching occasionally in whatever dream he's having that involves running.
"I used to worry," Maisie says. Quieter now. "That it would just be me and Dad forever. Not bad worried. Just." She thinks aboutit. "Lonely worried. Dad was happy but there was a kind of happy that was missing."
I look at her profile. At the serious careful face of this eight-year-old who feels things deeply and articulates them with a precision that still catches me off guard.
"And now?" I say softly.
She looks out at the ranch. "Now the missing kind is there too." She says it simply. Like it's the most obvious thing. "Because of you."
I look back down at the bandana in my hands.
Take one more careful stitch.
The thread pulls through clean, the seam holds, and the tear is gone like it was never there.
I sit on the cabin porch steps in the Sunday afternoon light with Beckett's favorite bandana in my hands, Maisie beside me, Rowdy dreaming in the yard, and feel something so complete move through me that I have to sit very still for a moment and just let it be there.
"There," I say. Hand the bandana back.
She takes it, examines the repair with the critical eye she inherited from her father, nods with satisfaction. "You can't even see it."
"That's the point."
She tucks it in her pocket. Looks at me. "Laney?"
"Mm."
"I'm glad you're here," she says. Straightforward. Uncomplicated. The way she says everything that matters.
I put my arm around her shoulders.
She leans into it.
