Sometimes weeks passed without a message. Other times, I received a few carefully worded lines that sounded as though they had been read by several people before they reached me.
“I’m safe.”
“I miss you both.”
“Tell Lily Daddy loves her.”
Those tiny messages became the center of our lives.
Our daughter, Lily, had been two when Marcus left.
She was four now, old enough to ask questions but still too young to understand why the answers never changed.
“Why can’t Daddy come home tonight?” she would ask.
“Because he’s doing an important job,” I would explain, smoothing her hair away from her face.
“More important than bedtime?”
That question always cut deeper than she knew.
“No, sweetheart,” I would say softly. “Nothing is more important than you. Daddy just has to finish helping people first.”
Every night, Lily would climb onto my bed and reach for the photograph on the nightstand. She held it in both hands as though it were something fragile and sacred. Then she would kiss the blurry image of a man in desert camo and whisper, “Come home safe, Daddy.”
