Alan knew Phoebe was trying to save him. He could hear her voice, could hear the tremor in each word as she counted compressions, knew he was lying on the dock in a pool of blood, beside a dead man. He knew there were holes in his chest — right side, left side, a lot of damage. His professional opinion was that he didn’t have much of a chance.

He could feel the thin thread that tied him to his body, a tiny glowing lifeline. He could stay, he thought.

But a breeze blew behind him, fresh and sweet as Kentucky springtime, and the sound of the rain pattered on glass, and he turned away from the sad scene on the dock — the pretty dark-haired woman fighting off tears, fighting to save a life, the dead man, the dying man — and he found an open window, yellow-and-white gingham curtains blowing, and on the other side a sky heavy with clouds, air hazed with a sweeter, gentler rain. He walked to the window, hoping, praying.

If any more of these windows open, don’t go through them, Phoebe had told him, and he remembered that. But he looked out the window, and Chick was on the other side, sitting on a tire swing they’d had in their backyard, spinning in slow, lazy circles. When she saw him, she smiled and called, “Daddy!” and for the first time in so very long, he heard her beautiful voice.

He did not let himself think about what lay behind him, even when he heard Phoebe’s voice say, “I love you. And you promised me.” His little girl was out there in the rain, and he was going to be with her again.

He climbed through the window, and there was no drop. He was simply and easily on the other side, and the wet grass swished around his ankles and the breeze was fresh and pure, and Chick’s smile was so bright and beautiful he would never need to see the sun again.

She clambered out of the tire swing and came running to him, arms held wide, and he dropped to his knees and embraced her. She was taller, but not much taller, older but not much older, time had passed for her, but nowhere near as quickly as it had passed for him.

He pulled her close and hugged her, buried his nose in her hair, smelled her little-girl scent that was shampoo and sunshine and flowers and lovely spring rain rolled all together. “God, I missed you,” he said.

“I was always with you, Daddy,” she told him. “A part of me will always be with you. Always.” She kissed his cheek, and he felt the brush of her eyelashes against his skin, and he felt her arms tighten around him — little thin arms around his neck, little hands patting his back. The same hands that he had held when she was first learning to walk, and later when they were crossing streets or hiking over rough ground. They were hands he’d thought he would hold when she grew up and walked down the aisle to marry some young man who would love her and cherish her.

That hadn’t happened. But now he had won his way back to her. He had his little girl again.

“I missed you more than you could ever know,” he said. And he smiled at her, joyous, triumphant.

But she shook her head. “I do know. I watched. And I waited for you, Daddy, because I was afraid you would come here. But you can’t stay here. And neither can I.”

She seemed taller as she said that, and her voice seemed less a little girl’s voice.

“No,” he said. “I just found you.”

But she was stretching, growing taller, turning into a woman before his eyes, and when she spoke, her voice was a woman’s voice. “You have your whole life ahead of you, and I’m dead, and you have to move on. You have to let go of me now. You have to live; you have so much to live for. You have Phoebe. And babies waiting for you to be their father. A whole future back there.”

She pulled away, a woman with his daughter’s face, tall and beautiful and confident as he had always dreamed she would be. “I love you, Daddy,” she said. “I will always love you. But I’m done now. I did what I came to do. We had as long as we had — as long we were supposed to have. You and I... we chose this before I was born, and before you were born. I had to leave you back when Mamma was so terrible so that I could be with you today. Right here, right now. To give you the secret you’ve been waiting for your whole life. I had to be here when you needed me, to tell you to go back. And this was the only way we could do that.”

“I’ll always need you.” He looked at her, pleading with his eyes for his child suddenly grown to womanhood to tell him what he wanted to hear.

Instead she said, “You have to hurry, Daddy. Phoebe needs you. You were meant for each other. For here, for now, for forever. But if you don’t hurry, it will be too late.”

The pain was there again — the pain that had swallowed him the day Chick died and that had never gone away. He’d left his little girl in a white box on a green hill, and the only thing in the world he’d wanted to do was crawl in there with her and let the earth fall down on top of him. And now he had her back. He was holding her hands and looking into her eyes and she was warm and real and alive, and she was telling him that he had to leave her behind again. He didn’t think he could do it.

She seemed to know what he was thinking, because she wiped the tears from his cheeks and smiled at him — the smile that had wrenched his heart a dozen times a day from the very first time he saw it. “It’ll be okay, Daddy. I promise. I’ll be waiting when you get back. When you’re supposed to be here. Hand me my lucky stone. Let it go, let me go with it. If you let it go, it will free us both.”

She kissed his cheek, and be believed her — that she would be there, that she wasn’t lost. But letting go was so hard.

Still, he dug into his pocket, into his wallet, and pulled out her lucky stone, the stone that had been his solid link to her — that had been with her the day she died and that had been with him every day since.

She had survived. They were eternal, the two of them. Father and daughter, and eternity would still be there when he was supposed to return. He could let go of the stone. He could set her free, and himself as well.

He handed her the stone, and she smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “Go, and live the life you were meant to live.”

She shimmered away into the rain, a rainbow vanishing while its promise lingered.

Alan started back into the darkness and the pain of life, carrying that promise as he had carried the pebble in his wallet — holding it in a safe place in his heart where nothing could take it away.