Chapter 1 — Fifteen Minutes

With fifteen minutes left before the taxi arrived to take him to the airport, Marcus Vance realized that his business trip to Chicago could wait.

His black suitcase stood near the front door of his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

His suit jacket was draped over one arm, his phone in the other hand, while his mind was already somewhere over the Midwest, rehearsing the presentation he had to deliver that afternoon—the slides, the numbers, and the questions the board might ask.

In every way that mattered, he was already gone.

That was what he would think about afterward, again and again: how close he had come to already being gone.

Then Lily appeared barefoot from the hallway.

She was six years old.

At first, she said nothing.

She simply ran toward him, wrapped both arms around his waist, buried her face against his shirt, and held on.

“Daddy,” she said, muffled against him.

“Don’t leave today.”

Marcus smiled instinctively, the automatic smile of a busy parent dealing with a child’s clinginess on a morning when he needed to travel.

“It’s only for two nights, sweetheart,” he said.

And he might have kept smiling, kept thinking about Chicago, picked up his suitcase, and walked out the door into a very different future if his daughter had not done one small thing.

She shook her head.

Then she looked toward the kitchen.

That single glance, the quick flick of a six-year-old’s eyes toward the next room, made Marcus’s smile disappear. For the first time all morning, he actually stopped, looked at his child, and listened.

Chapter 2 — Don’t Leave Today

 

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