Nora had no way of knowing that what Lila wrote would soon bring an elderly surgeon to tears.
She knew only that two people who had arrived in the cafeteria looking invisible had begun to eat.
And for that evening, it seemed like something worth doing.
Earlier that morning, Andre had been standing in the hallway of Woodlawn Community Arts Center, arguing good-naturedly with a plumber about the temperature of a dance studio. He was the center's director, a job that involved more broken pipes and grant applications than people imagined when they heard the word arts.
His wife, Simone, had called before her first class at the elementary school where she taught art.
"Did you remember Lila's yellow cardigan?" she had asked.
"It's in her bag."
"And the permission slip?"
"Signed."
"And that you married a brilliant woman?"
"I say it every morning."
She had laughed, and the sound had moved through the phone like sunlight.
At nine forty-eight, a teacher from Simone's school called to say his wife had collapsed while preparing paint for the third-grade class. By ten twenty, Andre was in the emergency department of St. Agnes, gripping a plastic bag that held her earrings and a wedding ring that someone had removed before the scans.
A blood vessel in Simone's brain had ruptured. The neurosurgical team was preparing an emergency procedure to secure the aneurysm and manage the bleeding, but the physician explaining it was careful not to promise what the next hours would bring.
Andre remembered asking the same question three times.
"Will she wake up?"
The answer never changed: they were doing everything they could, and it was too early to know.
Lila arrived after school with Andre's sister, Patrice, who had driven forty minutes through the rain. Patrice stayed until her own son's asthma worsened at home; she left reluctantly, promising to return first thing in the morning.
By then Andre had made six calls, answered a dozen messages, and walked the same corridor enough times to know exactly which floor tiles were chipped.
His daughter had asked for her mother only twice.
The other times she asked whether her father wanted water, whether his phone was charged, and whether it was all right if she sat very close to him. Andre answered her questions as though the answers were the only things keeping the day from collapsing.
"You can ask me if you're scared," he told her once.
"I know," Lila said.
"Are you?"
"A little."
He kissed the top of her head. "Me too."
Then a nurse told them the surgery was continuing, and Andre decided he couldn't leave the waiting room for dinner. Lila didn't ask again, even when her stomach growled loudly enough for him to hear.
That was the part Nora would eventually find hardest to forget.
At eight years old, Lila had already begun arranging her own needs around the fear of the adult she loved.