"Yes."
"What are they for?"
She was quiet so long he thought she might not answer. Then she said, "They're the days she had it."
He closed his eyes.
"She writes the number every morning," Linnea said. "And it's supposed to be the brave days. Days without the grape juice. That's what it means. Dr. Mehrotra said. And it's supposed to go up. And it did go up. But she had it. I could smell it. Not every day. But some days. After school and sometimes at breakfast too." She pulled away a little to look up at him, to make sure he understood. "So the number was wrong. But I couldn't fix the number, because it's her number. So I made a dot. One for every day I smelled it. With a pencil, so it wouldn't wipe."
"When did you start?"
"After your birthday." She thought. "Not the next day. Not the next day after that either. When you were at Baltimore."
Nine dots. Nineteen days since his birthday party. He did the arithmetic without wanting to.
"Why didn't you tell me, Bug?" He said it as gently as he knew how, and he meant it as a question, not a reproach, and still he heard it land on her like something with weight. "You could have told me. On the phone. Or on the weekend, when I was home."
She looked down at the quilt. She traced a stitched star with one finger.
"Because the number kept going up," she said. "And you looked at it. You looked at it on Saturday. You were getting the milk and you looked at it and you said, Look at that, and you kissed Mommy. And I thought—" She stopped, and he understood that she was trying to say something that was too large for her words, and that she was going to try anyway, because she was his daughter and Noelle's daughter, and they were both people who tried. "I thought maybe you knew. And it was a grown-up thing. And it was okay. And I was wrong about the smell."