She came with a duffel bag of clothes, and Sunshine the bear, and a loaf of bread from Maureen Brennan wrapped in a dish towel, and a framed photograph of Tripod. She walked into the purple room at the end of the upstairs hall and stood in the middle of it and turned in a slow circle, looking at the moon curtains and the bookshelf full of library books and the nightlight shaped like a star and the bed with the blue moon blanket folded across the foot of it. Then she sat down on the bed and put her hands in her lap.
"Is this really mine?" she asked.
"As long as you need it," Sam said. "And it'll still be here after, whenever you want to visit."
She nodded seriously. Then she lay back on the bed and spread her arms out and looked at the ceiling, where Nora had stuck glow-in-the-dark stars, dozens of them, in what Nora insisted was the exact pattern of the sky over Water Street on the night they found her.
That night, Sam did what he had not done in more than two years. He checked for monsters.
He did it with tremendous thoroughness. He looked under June's bed with a flashlight and declared it clear. He looked in the closet, and behind the curtains, and in the toy box, and in the drawer of the nightstand, in case a very small monster was hiding there, and June giggled into Sunshine's fuzzy head until she could barely breathe. Then he went down the hall to Nora's room and did it all again, while Nora, who was nearly twelve and much too old for this, rolled her eyes and tried not to smile and failed.
"You have to do the song," June called from her room. "Nora said you do the song."
"Nora's been telling you too much," Sam called back.
"Do the song, Dad," said Nora, from her bed.
So he stood in the upstairs hallway between their two open doors, with the light off and the nightlights glowing, one a star and one a moon, and he sang it. Badly. Off-key. With ridiculous made-up verses about Tripod and Sunshine the bear and pancakes that looked like blobs. His voice cracked on the second line and he kept going anyway. By the last chorus Nora was singing with him, softly, from her bed, and June was singing too, a little behind, the way she had in the basement on the night he found them.
You'll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away.
When it was quiet, a small voice came from the purple room.
"Goodnight, Daddy."
And from the other room, after a moment, a slightly bigger one.
"Goodnight, Dad."
Sam Whitley stood in the dark hallway of his house on Locust Street, between his two daughters, and found that for the first time in a very long time, the silence in the house did not frighten him at all.
"Goodnight, girls," he said. "I'm right here."
THE END