Everything after that happened very fast and very slowly at the same time.
Nurses rushed in. Someone pulled Lily back by the shoulders. A doctor shouted numbers she did not understand. She stood in the corner with her hands pressed over her mouth, watching them work on her father's chest, while Cecilia sobbed loudly beside her and Clara hid her face in her mother's coat.
"Please," Lily whispered. "Please, please."
It was the same word she had used, as a child, on the other side of a locked door.
Eleven minutes later, the doctor stepped back and lowered his hands.
"Time of death," he said quietly. "Four forty-two p.m."
The monitor flatlined into a long, steady tone.
There was a terrible pause. Then Cecilia let out a wail that rang through the whole corridor.
She threw herself across Edward's body, clutching his hand, begging him not to leave her. Evelyn started to cry. Clara stared at the wall.
Lily did not make a sound.
She stood there, perfectly still, looking at her father's face. It looked peaceful now. The worry lines had smoothed away.
For the first time in years, he looked like the man in the photographs, the one who had signed his name Papa and mailed it from faraway cities.
A thought came to her, small and cruel.
I never got to ask him why.
Why he stayed away. Why he believed her stepmother and not her. Why a man who could build an empire could not see what was in front of him.
"I read your letter," he had said.
Which letter? she thought. The one I wrote when I was twelve? Or another one?
She had written no others. She was sure. So what had he been trying to say?
A nurse touched her arm, kindly. "Miss? Would you like to sit down?"
"I'm fine."
"You don't look fine."
"I'm fine," Lily repeated, and walked out into the corridor, past the waiting room, past the reception desk, past the glass doors, and into the parking lot.
She walked until she reached the far end, where there was a low concrete wall beneath a lamp.
Then she sat down on it, and her whole body began to shake.
It was Martha who found her. She came running across the car park in her old coat and her house slippers, and when she saw Lily's face, she did not ask a single question.
She just sat down on the cold wall and gathered Lily into her arms like a child.
"He's gone," Lily said, into her shoulder. "Martha, he's gone."
"I know, baby."
"He was the only one. Even if he didn't listen. Even if he never saw. He was the only one I had."
"You have me," Martha said fiercely. "You will always have me."
Lily cried then. She cried until her chest ached and her voice cracked and there was nothing left, and Martha held her through all of it, rocking her slowly, humming the same tune she had hummed over a hundred small suppers in the kitchen.
Across the car park, behind the glass doors, a figure in black stood watching them.
Cecilia was not crying anymore. Her face was dry and calm. In her right hand, she held a battered leather briefcase, her husband's briefcase, which the nurses had handed to her an hour earlier.
She turned it over once in her hands, as though weighing it. Then she tucked it under her arm and walked away.