Looking for something to read, he picks up a book he recommended but his wife abandoned (“Just not my thing”). It’s a short book, a lovely piece of historical fiction, and he decides to read it again. In opening it, he finds the slip of paper his wife had been using as a bookmark: a drawing in a childish hand. A heart and some flowers. His daughter’s name scribbled in the lower corner.

He studies the drawing for a moment, unable to place when or where his daughter drew it. At school? At daycare? At the grandparents’? At home?

Pictures of the past are one thing, but this sends him back into the past so completely that he sits and stares at the drawing for some time, tracing the lines with his finger, a small smile curling into the corners of his mouth.

Now seventeen, his daughter is edging up against adulthood, sliding one foot after another closer and closer, ever so surreptitiously. In truth, she’s been doing this since she was a little girl: sliding one foot a little closer to the threshold of whatever comes next, with it all ending in the inevitable: moving out, starting her own life, being separate from her parents in the most complete way possible.