He placed it on the kitchen table.
Inside were the three letters, the photograph, and the unfinished reply.
He unfolded the last letter.
I still love you, Dad.
I hope someday we can talk.
Seventeen years.
He whispered the number aloud.
“Seventeen.”
It seemed impossible.
A whole childhood could pass in seventeen years.
A young woman could become middle-aged.
A father could grow old.
He studied Mara’s handwriting.
He wondered whether she was still in Chicago.
The thought had occurred to him when Ben first mentioned moving there, but Elias had pushed it away.
Chicago was enormous.
Millions of people lived there.
What chance was there of crossing paths with one person who might not even be there anymore?
Still, he had wondered.
Sometimes, while walking Alice to school, he watched women in medical coats entering clinics or hospitals.
Sometimes, at a traffic light, he imagined seeing Mara on the opposite sidewalk.
He would picture her turning toward him.
In his imagination, she always looked like the young woman who had left the ranch.
But he knew that could not be true.
She would be forty now.
Almost as old as Ruth had been when Mara began talking seriously about medicine.
Elias folded the letter with trembling fingers.
He took out a blank sheet of paper.
This time, he wrote more than a greeting.
Dear Mara,
I don’t know where this letter should go.
I don’t know if you would want to read it.
There are things a father should say to his daughter while he still has the chance.
I was wrong.
He stopped.
The words looked small on the paper.
Too small for seventeen years.
He tried again.
I was proud of you.
I always was.
I was just too stubborn and too afraid to tell you.
His eyes blurred.
He wiped them with the back of his hand.
A faint cough came from Alice’s room.
Elias immediately put down the pen.
He folded the unfinished letter and returned everything to the box.
Then he went to his granddaughter.
She was sleeping, but her breathing sounded rougher than before.
He sat on the edge of her bed.
“Easy, sweetheart,” he whispered.
She turned toward him.
He brushed damp hair from her forehead.
The fever was rising again.
Wednesday was a long day.
Alice did not want breakfast.
Her cheeks were flushed, but she shivered under the blankets.
Elias took her temperature, encouraged her to drink, and called the clinic again.
The nurse asked several questions.
Was Alice breathing normally?
Was she alert?
Was she drinking water?
Elias answered as carefully as he could.
At that moment, Alice could still speak easily, though she was tired.
The nurse urged him to bring her in for an examination that day.
He found a neighborhood urgent-care office that would see her that afternoon.
Getting there was difficult.
Ben had the family’s newer vehicle, and Elias’s old pickup, brought from Wyoming, had become unreliable in the city cold.
He wrapped Alice in her red coat and took a taxi, watching the fare rise all the way across town.
At the clinic, they waited while other patients came and went.
Alice leaned against his side.
“Are we going home soon?”
“I hope so, little one.”
A clinician examined her, listened to her chest, and explained that she appeared to have a respiratory infection.
Her condition did not yet seem severe enough to require admission, but she needed close watching.
The clinician gave Elias clear instructions about fever, fluids, breathing changes, and when to seek emergency help.
Elias listened intently.
He had always been careful with sick animals.
He knew how quickly something small could become serious.
But caring for Alice frightened him in a way no sick calf ever had.
At the front desk, he learned that their insurance coverage was not as settled as Ben had believed.
Some paperwork from the family’s move was still incomplete.
The clinic visit and prescriptions cost more than Elias expected.
He paid what he could.
Then he looked at the little pile of bills remaining in his wallet.
He had less than forty dollars.
On the ride home, Alice fell asleep against his arm.
He stared out at the buildings sliding past the taxi window.
In Wyoming, a man could ride for an hour and see nothing but fields, hills, and sky.
Here, thousands of windows glowed around him.
Thousands of people lived behind them.
Still, Elias had never felt quite so alone.
He thought of Ruth.
He thought of Mara.
He wondered what either of them would have said.
Ruth would have told him to keep his head clear.
Mara, if she had become the doctor she dreamed of being, would have told him which symptoms mattered.
He wished he could call them both.
