JUNE

Mara taped the paper to the refrigerator because she needed something that did not change.

It was a child's drawing—three stick figures and a sun that took up half the sky. The figures were labeled in careful, blocky handwriting that belonged to her sister's seven-year-old: MOM DAD BABY. The baby was an oval with a smiling line for a mouth and legs that pointed in opposite directions, as if it were mid-celebration. The sun had been colored past the edges, yellow wax pressed hard enough to leave grooves in the paper beneath.

Mara pressed the tape down once, then again, smoothing the corners as if they might lift and undo everything. She stepped back. The refrigerator hummed with patient consistency. The house smelled faintly of coffee that had been reheated too many times, its bitterness layered with milk that had been forgotten on the counter and then remembered too late.

Her daughter—their daughter—made a small sound from the bassinet by the couch. Not a cry. Just a noise, like a note written in the margin of a page.

"I know," Mara told her. "You're bored."

June blinked up at her, solemn and unblinking, as if considering whether this explanation was acceptable. Her fists were curled tight near her cheeks, her face red in that way newborns were, as though they had just arrived from somewhere loud and were still adjusting to quiet.

The baby's name was June. Mara still felt a small jolt of recognition when she said it aloud. June. A month, a beginning, a thing that returned every year whether you were ready or not. She had liked the way it sounded—soft but certain. Noah had liked that it was ordinary. "Nothing to live up to," he'd said. "She can just be."

Today was the day Noah came home.

The thought had woken her before dawn, her heart racing. She had lain in the darkness listening to June breathe from the bassinet beside the bed. Three weeks. Noah had missed all of it—the labor, the arrival, the first confused nights of learning how to be a mother. He had been present through screens and cracking phone calls, but he had not been here. Today, he would be.

Mara moved through the house checking things that did not need checking. The bag for the airport sat by the door, straps neatly folded. She'd packed it yesterday and reorganized it this morning, though nothing needed reorganizing. June's diaper bag was stocked with absurd precision—extra onesies rolled tight, wipes refilled, pacifier clipped to the strap even though June treated it with suspicion.

Mara had changed June's outfit twice already—not because the others were wrong, exactly, but because this one felt right. Yellow. Soft. Sunny without being loud. It mattered that Noah's first sight of June in person should be of her in this particular yellow dress, the one with small embroidered daisies on the collar.

June kicked gently, offended by the delay in breakfast.

"I know," Mara said, settling into the chair by the window. "You've waited long enough."

As she fed her, Mara's mind drifted backward, unspooling memory like thread.

---

Noah had been deployed the week after they found out she was pregnant.

They had taken the test in the bathroom because Mara couldn't wait the extra ten feet to the bedroom. The tile was cold under her bare feet. The second line appeared faintly, like the world hedging its bets.

Mara stared at it until her eyes watered.

Noah knocked once, then came in.

"Well?" he asked, trying to sound casual and failing.

She held up the test. His face changed—not into joy exactly, but into something looser, as if a tension he hadn't known was there had been released. He crossed the small space between them and put his hands on either side of her ribs, not touching her belly yet, as if the idea needed a moment to settle.

"Hey," he said. "Hey."

Mara laughed because the alternative felt dangerous.

"You did this," she told him.

They were still laughing when Noah's phone rang.

He glanced at the screen. His thumb hovered before he answered.

"Yeah," he said. "Yes, sir. Understood."

He didn't speak when he hung up. He looked at Mara as if memorizing her—the tilt of her head, the way her hair fell into her eyes.

"What?" she asked.

"Orders," he said. "Twelve months."

Mara sat down hard on the closed toilet lid. Noah crouched in front of her, hands steady on her knees.

"It's soon," he said.

"How soon?"

"Two weeks."

Two weeks. Then twelve months of waiting. Then, theoretically, he would come home.

That night, Noah sat at the kitchen table with his laptop open, adding baby items to an online cart with focused determination. He compared reviews, clicked between tabs, frowned at prices.

"What are you doing?" Mara asked.

"Preparing," he said. "I can't be here to carry things. So I'm going to make sure you don't have to."

Mara reached across the table and put her hand over his. "You're not a supply depot," she said.

He smiled faintly. "I know. But it's what I can do."

In the days before he left, Noah fixed things. The cabinet hinge that always squeaked. The smoke detector batteries. The car. He showed Mara where the water shut-off was, then labeled it in block letters with a marker.

"You think I can't survive without you," she said.

"I think you can survive a lot," Noah replied. "I just don't want you to have to."

On his last night home, Mara found him on the couch speaking quietly into his phone.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Recording," he said. "Messages. Your app says the baby can hear voices soon."

Mara sat beside him and listened.

"Hi," Noah said into the phone. "June—if your mom picked that name. She might. She likes months. I'm your dad. This is already weird. I tried."

Mara laughed despite herself.

He recorded many of them. Some silly. Some careful. One where he tried to sing and gave up halfway through, clearing his throat and muttering an apology to a future he could only imagine.

When he left, the house became something that required effort.

---

Mara painted the nursery. Repainted it when the first color felt too serious. Assembled furniture with instructions spread across the floor. Washed clothes too small to imagine using. Noah called when he could. Sometimes it was five minutes through static. Sometimes only a voice message.

"You're doing great," he'd say.

"I'm doing pregnant," Mara replied once.

As her belly grew, strangers smiled at her in grocery store aisles. Older women offered unsolicited advice. At night, Mara lay in bed and listened to Noah's side remain untouched, the sheets cool and smooth.

She learned the difference between alone and lonely.

When June kicked, Mara pressed Noah's phone to her belly and played a recording. June sometimes answered with a thump that felt like agreement.

June was born in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm.

Labor was heat and pressure and work. It was Mara gripping the bed rail while rain battered the window, the sound so loud it felt like weather inside her head. It was surrender. It was endurance.

When June arrived—slick, indignant, furious at the world—Mara felt everything narrow to that small body on her chest.

"She's here," Mara whispered.

Her mother brushed tears from her face. "Call him."

Noah answered on the second ring.

"I did it," Mara said, and laughed.

There was a pause, and then Noah made a sound that broke something open in her chest. "Is she—"

"She's angry," Mara said. "She has opinions."

"Good," Noah said. "I respect that."

"Meet your daughter," Mara said.

Noah didn't speak for several seconds. "Hey," he said finally, and the word fractured.

That night, when the room was quiet, Mara played one of Noah's recordings. June stilled, listening in her own way.

"He's here," Mara whispered. "As much as he can be."

---

The months passed in fragments. Diapers. Sleeplessness. Small victories. Noah watched June grow through videos and screens, learning her face in pieces.

"That roll was strategic," he said of her first attempt. "She's planning."

As the end of the deployment approached, Noah's voice sounded closer. More solid. Like something nearing.

Mara began preparing again. Cleaning things that didn't need cleaning. Rewashing sheets that were already clean.

Her sister watched her scrub the hallway floor. "Are you cleaning," she asked, "or negotiating with fate?"

"Both," Mara said.

On the morning Noah was due home, Mara woke before dawn. June slept through it all, one arm flung wide as if she'd claimed the space.

Noah's flight was scheduled to land mid-morning. Processing. Briefing. Release.

Mara fed June and watched the clock.

Her phone buzzed.

If she's awake, play her the one where I sing, Noah texted. I want honesty from the start.

Mara smiled. She played it.

Noah's voice filled the room, awkward and earnest. In the background, there were other voices, metal clinking, life continuing around his attempt at tenderness.

June stilled.

"See?" Mara whispered. "He's real."

Late morning stretched thin.

Mara changed June's outfit again. Yellow stayed.

At last, there was a knock at the door.

Relief hit her so hard she had to grab the wall.

She lifted June from the swing and opened the door.

Two people stood on the porch. They were in uniform.

The image did not rearrange itself.

"Mara Bell?" the woman asked.

Mara nodded once.

"I'm Captain Reyes," the woman said. "May we come in?"

The sentence was polite. It was not optional.

Inside, the officers removed their hats. Captain Reyes held a folder in both hands.

"Mara—" she began.

"No," Mara said, the word small and useless.

Captain Reyes inhaled. "There was an incident," she said carefully. "On his final mission."

The room seemed to tilt.

"He was killed in action."

The words landed with unbearable neatness.

Mara laughed once, short and sharp. "No," she said again.

Her mind offered irrelevant facts: the baseboards were clean. The sheets were washed. He never saw her.

June whimpered, offended by the tension.

Mara tightened her hold and rocked her slightly. "I know," she whispered.

Captain Reyes spoke gently about support, about next steps. Mara took a card without looking.

When the officers left, the house closed in behind them.

Mara sat on the couch, June against her chest. The refrigerator hummed.

On it, the drawing glowed. MOM DAD BABY.

Mara reached for her phone.

She opened Noah's recordings.

His voice filled the room.

"I'm your dad," he said. "I loved you before I met you. I loved the idea of you. I loved you when you were barely more than a promise your mother was carrying."

Mara closed her eyes.

"I'm coming home," Noah said.

June's fingers curled into Mara's shirt.

Mara reached for the notepad on the table. The one with the abandoned list for the airport.

She turned to a blank page and wrote:

June.

Things I don't want you to forget.

Her hand shook, then steadied.

1. Your father tried to sing.

June made a soft sound.

Mara pressed play again.

The pen scratched across the paper as Noah's voice continued—imperfect, present.

2. Your father loved you before he met you.

The silence stayed.

Mara kept writing.

3. He was real.

Her pen moved across the page, documenting what she could not let slip away. Outside, the day continued its indifferent progress toward evening. The refrigerator hummed. The world spun on.

Mara wrote. June listened. And in the recordings, Noah's voice persisted—a ghost made of sound, a father speaking to a daughter he would never know in the flesh, but whom he had loved with a fierceness that transcended time and distance and death itself.

The list grew. Mara wrote through the afternoon, through the early evening, writing everything she could remember, everything she wanted June to know, everything that mattered about the man who had become a voice, a series of recordings, a memory that would have to suffice.

Outside, the sun moved toward the horizon. The house remained quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the scratch of pen on paper and the occasional sound June made—small, uncertain sounds of a baby adjusting to a world that had just become infinitely more complicated.

Mara wrote. And as she wrote, she began—in some small way—to survive.