“I know,” she sighs. “But I want you with me all the time.”
“I want that, too, sweetheart.”
She reaches up and touches where I’m plaiting her hair. “Papa does a better job than you,” she says. “Yours always fall out.”
I laugh. “You have a very talented papa.”
Once her hair is finished, she climbs off of me and settles back into her pillows.
I look toward the teetering stack of books by her bedside. “What story tonight, my love? Only one, and then it’s lights-out.”
She nibbles at her bottom lip with her baby teeth and I already know what she’s going to say. It’s been the same for months now.
I pull the book with the worn green cover from where it sits at the top of the stack. “Faeries of the British Isles,again?”I ask incredulously.
I thumb through the pages, their illustrations now long faded with time. “Which chapter would you like?”
She burrows into my shoulder and presses her lips to my ear, her sweet voice asking what it does nearly every night. “Tell me again, the story of the faerie king.”
