Roman sits in the sterile hush of the hospital room, the kind of hush that creeps under skin and makes a home inside your bones. It’s 3:42 a.m.—again—and the hallway lights outside the door are too bright, too indifferent. Fluorescent ghosts flicker on white tile. He doesn’t move. He's holding his daughter.

Harper is curled in his arms, and the weight of her is almost nothing now. Almost. She's had her twelvth birthday here.

Her breath rattles. A wet, dragging kind of cough that claws its way out of her. Like her lungs are trying to rid themselves of her body. Her ribs jut like branches under her hospital gown, sharp, brittle. He runs a hand along her hair—what’s left of it. Wisps, really. Tufts. Her scalp is pale and dappled with bruises. Her skin is paper.

He knows he used to sing to her. Every night. He knows used to giggle when he tried to hit the high notes.

She doesn’t laugh anymore. The last time he sang, she just closed her eyes. He doesn’t sing anymore either. He hums. Quietly. Almost not at all.

Harper shifts, lets out another fit of coughing. It sounds like gravel scraping across pavement. He tightens his arms around her, whispers something no one will ever hear. His eyes sting, but he’s past crying. It’s a dry kind of grief now. Hollowed-out.

There’s an IV pump beside them, beeping in a rhythm that Roman has memorized. There’s a list of meds on a clipboard. He knows all their names. Knows their side effects, knows their dosages, knows how long it takes each one to take hold—or not.

He’s sold the house. The one with the maple in the front yard Harper climbed until she was ten. The one with the blue room she painted herself, with too much glitter in the walls. She still wants it to look like a night sky. “So I can always sleep under the stars,” she says, croaks.

He'a sold the house and everything in it. Except the stars. He just couldn't bring those. But he's brought the snow globe. The one from Yellowstone, where she first saw her first buffalo and whispered, awed, “They look so tired.”

He remembers saying, “Yeah. But strong.” He had been wrong. About one of them, at least.

Roman leans his forehead to hers, tries to catch a sliver of her warmth. She’s cold now, even with three blankets wrapped around her like she's some sort of burrito.

His own body aches from holding her for so long, but he won’t put her down. She’s been asking to be held more often. Quietly. Not like before, when she used to cry out for him after nightmares. Now she just looks at him. Just a glance. And he knows.

“You’re okay,” he lies, mouth pressed against her temple. “You’re doing so good, baby. So good.”

Her fingers twitch at his shirt. Her voice is a thread. “Daddy?”

“I’m here.”

His little girl coughs again, and he feels something wet on his chest. Blood. There’s always blood now.

“I don’t wanna go alone,” she says.

Roman swallows, but the lump doesn’t move. “You’re not. I’m right here.”

“Will you tell me the river story?”

He breathes in through his nose, slow, steady.

“Of course," he's told this one every night for weeks now, ever since the oxygen tubes went in. It's about a girl and her father, paddling down a river made of moonlight.

“The stars are out,” he begins, softly, “and the water is silver, and the boat is just big enough for two. The current’s gentle, like a lullaby, and the girl’s got a lantern that never goes out…”

She blinks up at him, slowly, like it’s costing her everything. “Is there music?”

“There’s always music," says he, kissing her cheek. "It’s the wind in the trees. The river sings it, and it sounds like…” he hesitates.

“Like what?” she whispers.

“Like your laugh,” he says.

Harper doesn’t reply. Her breath catches. Starts again. Weak. Thin.

Roman keeps telling the story. Voice steady, low. He paints the sky with words, draws mountains with metaphors, fills her ears with things she’ll never see. His voice trembles, but never breaks. Not while she’s still here.

The machines hum. The beeping slows.

His eyes are dry. He's cried enough, grieved enough. Done enough.

Still, she's dying.