Rory’s hoodie stank of antiseptic and that nasty sterile, sour miasma that hung in the air at the hospital. He couldn’t shake the stench. Maybe it hadn’t truly seeped into his clothes during his time under the doctor’s care. Maybe it was just the way dying men smelled.

He tugged at his collar as he shuffled onto the back porch. He never used to shuffle. Shuffling was for men twice his age. But here he was, barely strong enough to lift his foot from the ground and swing it forward to walk. He managed to reach the old bench Alice’s father had built for them when they first got married and lowered himself down. He and the bench both creaked and groaned.

He fixed his attention on Claire, where she sat in the yard beneath the big oak tree. Her teenage body, getting long and lanky all of a sudden these past few months, formed a question mark on the lounge chair Her head and shoulders, the top of the loop, bent forward over the open textbook balanced on her knees. She scribbled furiously in the spiral notebook laying on her left leg. Tinny music came from the headphones that lay on the ground beside her, discarded and forgotten.

He marveled at her focus. It was the same as her mother when she prayed in the garden in the evenings. They were more alike than either of them would ever admit. Claire had fire where Alice had grace. Alice’s God operated with mathematical precision. Claire worshiped mathematics.

“Making plans to hack the Pentagon?” he asked.

She snorted. “I’m writing code for the robotics club. Mrs. Burgermeister got it all wrong. She’ll never admit it, but she wouldn’t know good code if it bit her. She probably thinks a Boolean loop is a kind of pasta.

For all Rory knew, it was.