The world is too quiet. Even the sirens have given up, their voices swallowed by the weight of something brighter than God.

He holds her in the living room, bare feet on cold tile, where her crayons still wait, where her laughter still lingers, like a ghost refusing to fade. Outside, the light trembles, a storm of white about to bloom, a heartbeat away from forever. She clings to him, small fingers knotted in his shirt. Her doll dangles from her wrist, one eye missing, the other wide open as if it knows what’s coming. “Daddy,” she whispers, her voice barely older than the wind, ”why’s the sky crying fire?”

He wants to tell her the truth, that the world has broken, that this light isn’t morning, that no one is coming to save them. But all that leaves his lips is, “Close your eyes, sweetheart. It’ll be over soon.” He feels her shudder, a breath, a heartbeat, the smallest, cruelest proof of life. And he breaks. Not with sound, but with silence so deep it swallows him whole.

He buries his face in her hair, smells the faint sweetness of soap and milk, and remembers every time she ran to him when thunder scared her, how he’d say, “It’s just the sky talking.” Now the sky is screaming, and there’s nowhere left to run. Ten seconds. He whispers her name, like a prayer no god deserves to hear. He tells her she’s safe, though he can feel the air burning through the window’s edge. Five seconds. She looks up, eyes wide, blue as the sea that will never exist again. “Will it hurt?” she asks. He smiles through the shaking. “Only for a blink.” He says, just like the time she scraped her knee when she was 2. Two seconds. He presses her face into his chest, wraps himself around her, like a shield made of love and useless bone. And as the light floods in, as the air turns white and soundless.

He whispers one last lie, the kind every parent bleeds to tell, “It’s okay, baby. Daddy’s got you.” And then, there is no sky, no sound, no pain. Only the echo of a heartbeat that tried to keep her safe a moment too long.