She was already running. Nora's head came up.
A man had stepped down from the third car. He was tall and a little stooped in the shoulders, in a tan canvas work jacket and jeans, with a duffel bag in one hand. His hair was cut short at the sides. He had stopped at the bottom of the steps and was looking up and down the platform with the uncertain care of a man who has gotten off at a stop he has never seen before, and his face was Daniel's face.
Not like it. It. The long jaw. The cleft in the chin that Daniel used to say he'd gotten when the angel pressed her thumb there to mark him finished. The eyebrows that went up at the inner corners, so that he always looked as if he had just been told something mildly surprising. The ears that stuck out a little. Nora's whole body went cold and then hot and then nothing at all, as if a wire somewhere had been cut.
"Papa, you're home! You're home, you're home!"
Lila hit him at the knees. The duffel fell. The man's hands came down on reflex, the way anyone's would when a small person collides with them, and then he was holding her, because she had climbed him, actually climbed him, her frog boots scrabbling at his thighs, her arms around his neck, and the conductor's cap went sideways and slid off and landed on the concrete upside down.
"I knew you'd come," Lila was saying into his collar. "I knew it, I told Mama you missed it, I told her, I told her."
The man was very still. Over Lila's shoulder his eyes found Nora's, and in them she saw something she could not have described afterward except to say that it was the look of a person who has walked into a room expecting it to be empty and found it full of everyone he has ever wronged.
Nora's legs moved. She didn't remember telling them to. She crossed the platform, and the people who were still on it parted for her, and the nurse in purple scrubs had stopped walking and put a hand to her mouth. Nora reached them. She put her hand flat on her daughter's back, between the small sharp wings of her shoulder blades, and felt Lila's heart going like a sparrow's.
She knew who he was. Of course she knew. There was only one other person in the world who wore that face.
She bent until her mouth was beside Lila's ear, close enough that she could smell the apple shampoo in Lila's hair and, underneath it, something else, something on the man's collar, diesel and cold air and cheap soap.
"Lila," she whispered. "He's not who you think, dear."
Lila didn't let go. "Yes he is."
"Sweetheart. Look at me."
"He's just tired," Lila said. "He's tired from the train. Papa, you're tired, right?"
The man opened his mouth and nothing came out. He shut it again. When he finally spoke his voice was lower than Daniel's had been, roughened, as if it had been left out in weather.
"Nora," he said. "I didn't know you'd be here. I swear to God I didn't know."
"Put her down, please, Tom."
He did, carefully, the way you'd set down a bowl filled to the brim. Lila's boots touched the platform and she kept hold of the front of his jacket with both fists. She was looking up at him, and her face was doing something terrible, the beginning of a doubt that she was trying to stamp out before it could take root.