"Huh?" he said. She waited. "I only know you're a person who needed someone to sit with," he said finally.
"The rest of it isn't really my business." She cried then, the kind that has been stored behind a locked door for a very long time. Not from weakness, but from years of having had no room that was safe enough to put it. A nurse appeared in the doorway, took one look, and quietly withdrew.
When Simone steadied herself, she looked at the crayon drawing on the wall. "Who made that?" "My daughter Olivia. Eight years old. Never met you."
"She drew me stars," Simone said. Richard nodded. "She said, 'The lady sleeping alone deserved some.'" Simone was quiet for a long moment.
When she spoke again, her voice was lower, more careful. "I had a daughter who used to draw me things," she said. "When she was small. Little houses, yellow suns in the top corner, always smiling because that's how children draw suns, the way the world is supposed to look."
She stopped and looked at her hands. "I used to tape them to my office window. She made them until she was about ten. And then she stopped."
A long pause. "I was traveling that month, a conference in Chicago. I don't remember what it was about. I remember Sophia's face when I got home, and the drawings were gone from her desk, and I didn't ask why."
Richard didn't say anything. He understood the value of not filling a silence like that. "I kept telling myself there would be more time," Simone said. "That when the company was stable, when the next quarter was finished, when the next acquisition closed, then I would slow down."
"Then I would be present." She exhaled slowly. "There was always a next quarter." "There's still time," Richard said quietly.
"She came when she heard you were hurt. That means she hasn't stopped." Simone looked at him. "How did you know she came?" "Because that's what kids do," he said.
"No matter what, they come." He said it simply, without sentiment, as a fact. The kind of fact you learn not from reading it somewhere, but from being the parent who shows up every night, even when you're tired, even when the room is quiet and no one seems to be listening, and discovering that they always know you were there. Then, very quietly, she asked, "Your children, are they all right with you working these hours?"
Such a small question. Such a human one. Richard blinked, slightly caught. "They're with my neighbor Mrs. Patton on late nights. She's retired."