Chapter 5: The Heartbeat She Grew Up With
That was six years ago.
Our daughter is six now. Her name is Hope, which Mark chose, on the porch, before he ever got sick — we’d picked it when we were just happy and pregnant and sure we had all the time in the world. She has never known a night without her father’s heartbeat, because that bear has sat on her pillow since she was an infant, and she presses its paw when she’s scared, or sad, or just missing a daddy she knows only from photographs and a steady sound in the dark.
“That’s Daddy’s heart,” she tells people, matter-of-factly, the way children state enormous things. She’s right. It is. And she has grown up not with a father-shaped hole, but with a father-shaped presence — a heartbeat that has tucked her in every single night of her life, exactly as Mark intended, so that the daughter he never held would never feel unheld.
