Daniel read it three times. He didn't reply. He folded it back into its envelope and put it in the glove box, and later in a shoebox on the top shelf of his closet in the townhouse. It wasn't a treasure box. It was something else, a place for things he didn't know what to do with yet. He didn't throw it away. He found that he couldn't, and that he didn't need to know why.
He did tell Claire about it, in the parking lot of Owen's school one afternoon in April, the two of them standing by her car waiting for the bell. She listened and nodded and was quiet for a while. Then she told him that she had enrolled in prerequisite courses for the nursing program at Brightpoint Community College, anatomy and chemistry, two nights a week, while her mother came down from Fredericksburg to watch Owen on the nights he wasn't with Daniel. She told him she was terrified and that she was forty-one pages behind in the chemistry textbook. He told her she would be a good nurse. He meant it. He had watched her in a vinyl chair beside a hospital bed, once, through a laptop screen, and she had never taken her eyes off the monitor.
They were becoming something. Neither of them knew yet what to call it. It wasn't a marriage, and it wasn't quite a friendship, though it had some of that. It was more like two people who had been in the same accident, standing together on the shoulder of the road, checking each other for injuries.