When Claire got sick, Ray held everything together. Drove her to treatment twice a week, learned what she could and couldn’t eat, kept the bills paid and the house running and his own fear quiet enough that she didn’t have to carry it too. Diane watched all of this from a careful distance. If it changed how she felt about him, she never said so.
The last thing Claire asked him, in a hospital room in March with pale light coming through the window, was to not give up on her daughter. He’d promised. Meant every word of it. She died four days later and Ray kept the promise the same way he kept all his promises — quietly, without fanfare, without expectation of anything in return. Diane left for college that fall.