"I asked her about it," she said. "Back in November, at the hospital. I asked her why she called you that. Do you want to know what she said?"
Sam nodded.
"She said she never had one. She said Nora told her stories about you every night in the basement. About how you check for monsters, and sing the sunshine song really bad, and make pancakes that look like animals but mostly look like blobs. And she asked Nora if she could borrow you. Just for pretend. And Nora said yes, she could share." Gloria took off her glasses. "So they practiced. Every night. Nora would tell a story about you, and at the end June would say goodnight, Daddy, to the dark. For three weeks. In a basement. And then you crawled through the wall." She shook her head slowly. "I've been doing this twenty-six years, Sam. I'm not going to tell a child to stop calling somebody Daddy who earned it. You talk to her mother. That's between you two."
So, in March, he did.
Crystal Daly was living in a recovery house for women in Bethlehem by then, a big shabby Victorian on a side street with a curfew and a chore chart and eleven other women trying, one day at a time, to stay alive. She had been sober for one hundred and twenty days. She had done twenty-eight days of inpatient treatment after the hospital, and then moved into the house, and she was working the morning shift at a bakery on Main Street, which she said was funny, considering. She had supervised visits with June every Wednesday afternoon in a room at the county office with Gloria in the corner.
She met Sam at a diner near the recovery house. She was twenty-four years old and looked both older and younger. She had put on weight since the hospital, and her curls were pulled back in a tight ponytail, and her hands, wrapped around a coffee mug, were never still. She could not look at him for the first several minutes.
"I wanted to say thank you," she said finally, to the table. "I've wanted to say it since November. I didn't know how. Every time I thought about it I just..." She stopped. "You found my baby in a hole in a wall. Because of me. Because I put her there. Because I took her there in the summer when we got evicted and I told her it was a castle. Because I let Rick near her. Because I was in that motel bathroom with a needle in my arm while she sat outside the door." Her voice broke. "Nobody should have to say thank you for that. I should've been the one."
Sam didn't say anything. He had learned, in his classes, that sometimes the kindest thing was not to rush in.
"I grew up in the system," Crystal said. "Did Gloria tell you that? Eleven placements by the time I was sixteen. Some of them were good. Most of them weren't. I aged out at eighteen with a trash bag of clothes and a bus pass. I had June at eighteen.