“I mean like...” She stopped. “Like the kind that stays calm when things are ugly.”
Ethan almost told her he was only calm because panic had wrecked enough of his life already. Instead he said, “Calm is usually just fear with manners.” Chloe absorbed that and nodded as if filing it away.
Ellie met Hope for the first time a week later under tight supervision.
The nurses had been reluctant about bringing a six-year-old into a still-complicated family-services situation, but Julia argued successfully that Ellie’s involvement had been stabilizing rather than disruptive from the beginning. So Ellie washed her hands, put on a too-large child visitor badge, and stared at Hope through the bassinet with such intense reverence Ethan thought she might explode.
“She’s tiny,” Ellie whispered.
“She’s a newborn,” he whispered back.
“She was under a leaf mountain.”
“Ellie,” Ethan warned gently.
But Chloe surprised him by smiling. “It kind of was a leaf mountain,” she said from the chair. Ellie looked at her, uncertainty flickering across her face. Chloe patted the seat beside her. “You can sit if you want,” she said. “Ranger already told me you’re okay.”