He did. Then he carried Marin to his bed, the one he usually shared with Lily on nights when her coughing frightened them both, and laid her on top of the faded blue quilt his mother had made before cancer thinned her hands. He removed Marin's wet shoes, set a trash can nearby in case she became sick, and placed a glass of water and two aspirin on the overturned milk crate he used as a nightstand. He considered calling someone, police, paramedics, anyone with authority.
But Corbin's voice had left a stain in his mind. "He owns people." Everett did not know whether that was true, but he knew men like Corbin rarely gambled without insurance. In the living room, Lily slept curled under a blanket printed with faded constellations, her hair spread across the pillow, her small hand resting against the silver charm she wore every day.
Everett knelt beside her and listened for the familiar wheeze. Her breathing was steady tonight. Thank God. He brushed a curl from her forehead and felt the hard little weight of the charm beneath the blanket.
A crescent-shaped silver pendant on a chain too expensive for anything else in their life. Norah had clasped it around Lily's neck the morning before she disappeared, saying it had belonged to someone who needed remembering. At the time, Everett had been too tired and angry to ask what that meant. He had spent the next 3 years asking in silence.
He dragged the kitchen table against the front door, set his old service flashlight within reach, and sat on the floor beside Lily because there was nowhere else to sleep. Rain tapped the windows. The pipes knocked. Every passing car slowed in his imagination.
Near dawn, exhaustion took him in jagged pieces, and his last thought before sleep was not about his job or Corbin, or even the woman in his bed. It was the same prayer he whispered every night: "Let Lily wake up breathing." She woke before he did, as always, because children with hard lives learn the household rhythms early. Everett opened his eyes to the smell of coffee and the soft scrape of a chair across linoleum.
Lily stood on a step stool at the counter in her purple pajama pants, carefully spreading peanut butter on toast with the seriousness of a surgeon. "Daddy!" she whispered when she saw him stir. "There's a princess in your room."
Everett sat up too fast, pain flashing through his neck. "She's not a princess." "She has sparkles on her dress." "That doesn't make somebody a princess."
Lily considered this, then nodded as if accepting an important legal distinction. Her pendant had slipped outside her shirt, catching the gray morning light. Everett rose, stiff and cold, and started the coffee stronger than usual. His phone showed 14 missed calls from numbers he did not recognize.