She looked up then, and her expression was something he couldn't read easily. Not grief exactly, more like the aftermath of grief. What's left when it's been lived with long enough that it's been incorporated. "I don't need sorry."
She said quietly. "I need things to go right for a while." He looked at her for a moment. "I can't promise that."
He said. "I know you can't." She said. "Nobody can promise that.
I'm just telling you what I need." She went back to the paper. He sat there a little while longer listening to Lucy's voice from down the hall telling Owen some long and winding story about something he couldn't quite make out. Owen's response was a burst of laughter, high and immediate, that bounced off the walls of the old house and disappeared into the dark corners of the ceiling.
He'd forgotten what a child's laughter sounded like inside these walls. He sat there until it went quiet and then he got up and went to find the tools to patch the bunkhouse wall. Um, the night Lucy knocked on his door was the night he stopped being able to pretend that this was just a business arrangement. It was late.
Well past 10:00, the house long since gone quiet. He was at his desk going over the winter supply list for the third time. Not because he expected to find new numbers, but because he didn't have anything better to do with his restlessness. The knock was small, three quick raps. The kind of knock that is trying to be decisive and mostly succeeds.
He opened the door. Lucy stood in the hall in her nightgown, her hair braided in two uneven plaits, her expression the serious considered expression she seemed to wear as a default setting. She was holding a piece of paper. "I have a question." She said.
"It's late." He said. "I know, but the question won't wait until morning." He looked at her for a moment. "Come in then."
She came in and looked around his room with the same inventory taking eyes as her mother, except more openly curious, and then sat down in the chair by the window as if she'd been invited to do so, which he supposed he had done technically. "What's the question?" He said. "Are you sad?" She said.