Kindergarten.
There should have been two backpacks.
Prom.
There should have been two dresses.
Sometimes I’d set the dinner table for four and only realize after placing the fourth plate down.
Daniel never commented when that happened.
He’d simply remove it.
I thought silence was how we protected each other.
I didn’t realize it was slowly dividing our house into the living and the unspoken.
Hannah’s eighteenth birthday fell on a Saturday.
We had thirty people in the backyard.
Folding tables.
Cheap paper lanterns.
My brother Kevin working the grill as though hamburgers required military precision.
My mother had ordered a sheet cake from the grocery store.
HAPPY 18TH HANNAH
Blue icing.
Hannah was leaving for college in three weeks.
Daniel and I had spent six months saving for her birthday present.
A used Honda Civic.
Nothing glamorous.
But when Daniel handed her the keys, she screamed so loudly our neighbor’s dog started barking.
“NO.”
“Yes.”
“Dad!”
She threw herself around his neck.
Daniel laughed.
I took a picture.
And then I noticed he was crying.
Not birthday crying.
Something else.
I knew immediately.
“No.”
He looked at me.
One word.
That’s all I needed.
“Daniel.”
“It’s time.”
“Not today.”
