Nathaniel Myers would never remember the exact words.

Just the sound.

The knock at the door at 10:17 p.m., sharp enough to echo through the quiet house and make his daughter stir in her crib. The hum of the refrigerator. The way the porch light caught the sheen of rain on the trooper's hat brim when Nate opened the door.

"Mr. Myers... there's been an accident."

The voice was calm. Trained. But it cut clean through him.

He stood there, gripping the doorframe with one hand, his bare feet cold against the hardwood. Somewhere in the middle of the sentence, he lost the thread — only catching fragments. Melissa. Collision. Fatal. He didn't ask them to repeat it. Didn't need to. His chest tightened, not in a rush of panic, but in the slow, crushing way that makes you realize you'll never be able to take a full breath again.

The officer's lips were still moving, but Nate's focus tunneled to the faint sound of crying upstairs. Ella. Her tiny, confused whimper filtered through the monitor on the kitchen counter. His hands itched to get to her, to hold something still here, something alive.

Melissa wasn't coming home.

The days afterward felt like he'd been dropped into a world where time was uneven — hours stretched into molasses when Ella refused to eat, then collapsed into minutes when he caught himself dialing his wife's number without thinking. Neighbors brought casseroles, murmuring the same soft phrases over and over: She was such a light. We're so sorry. He hated the pity in their eyes. Hated that they could all leave his house and go home to someone waiting for them.

He tried to keep life moving. Wake up, get Ella fed, drop her at his mother's, go to work, come home, feed her again, put her to bed. But the house felt hollow. Even with toys scattered across the floor and cartoons murmuring on the TV, it was empty.

Two weeks later, when she stood on his porch with a suitcase in one hand and a determined set to her jaw, Nate almost shut the door without thinking.

They'd never been close. Melissa's younger sister — always too quick to challenge him, always too ready to roll their eyes at his stubborn ways. He'd thought her too young to really understand what responsibility meant. And now here she was, rain dotting her shoulders, looking him straight in the eye.

"I'm moving in," she said, voice leaving no room for argument. "You can't do this alone."

He wanted to argue. Wanted to tell her he was doing it alone. That this was his life, his daughter, and he didn't need someone watching over him like he was about to fall apart. But the truth was, he was already falling apart — just very quietly, in the spaces no one saw.

Ella's small feet pattered against the floor as she came into the room, still clutching her worn-out stuffed bunny. She blinked sleepily up at her aunt, then held out her arms without hesitation.

Nate's throat tightened.

"Come inside." He finally muttered after a long moment. "You know where the guest room is. I was... just about to make dinner."