Chapter Four
MILLIE
The Next Morning
Sunday mornings have a distinct smell in this house.
It’s the smell of my father, Jonas McClane, who wakes before the sun has fully committed to the idea of rising, who grinds his coffee beans by hand because the electric grinder is, in his words, ‘an indignity to the bean,’ and who has the newspaper spread across the kitchen table before I’ve even made it down the hallway in my socks.
Roasted coffee, newsprint, and the faint warm ghost of last night’s dinner still cling to the air.
It’s the smell of something that has always been here, something that was here before I was born and will be here long after I stop noticing it.
But I notice it every time.
Especially now.
I pad into the kitchen dressed in my oldest sweater, the oversized charcoal one with the fraying sleeve hem that Dad has been threatening to throw away for three years and has never once touched, and I find him exactly where he always is.
Elbows on the table, paper folded to the section he’s reading, coffee steaming at his right elbow.
The reading glasses perched on the end of his nose make him look deeply, personally offended by whatever the front page has decided to say today.
“Morning,” I say.
He grunts, which is Dad for ‘Good morning, I love you, the news is idiotic.’
I move to the counter and start pulling ingredients without needing to think about it.
Sunday brunch has been this way since I was eleven years old, since the kitchen stopped being Mom’s domain and became mine by necessity, then by habit, and then, eventually, by something that felt like love.
Eggs, butter, the sourdough I baked yesterday, which is sitting on the board still swaddled in its cloth.
I start with the bread, slicing it thick.
The knife draws through the crust with that satisfying crunch that means the crumb is exactly right.
“The Clark County Commissioner for District Seven has made another statement,” Dad announces from behind his paper.
“Mmm…”
“He has used the phrase ‘Going forward…’ four times in two paragraphs.”
“A personal best.”
“A personal worst,” he corrects, and the crisp snap of a page turning, sharp and decisive, from someone who doesn’t believe in half measures. “This man cannot be trusted to run a city block, let alone a district.”
“You say that every week, Dad.”
“And every week I am proven right.”
I hide my smile in the butter dish.
This is the thing about Dad that most people don’t understand when they see him in a business context—all handshakes, measured silences, and a gravitas that could fill a room.
Here, at this kitchen table on a Sunday, he is simply himself.
Dry as the Nevada desert and twice as stubborn, with opinions about local politics that he reserves exclusively for Sunday mornings and a laugh, when it comes, that fills the room from the floor up.
I crack the eggs into the pan and listen to the butter hiss.
“The Henderson bypass,” he continues. “They’ve approved the funding.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Depends entirely on who you ask and whether you have any financial interest in the land adjacent to it. Which, interestingly, one of the Henderson councilmen appears to.”
“So that’s bad.”
“Catastrophically.” He folds the paper back on itself. “Pass me the toast when it’s ready.”
I do.
We eat the way we always do, at a measured pace, with conversation woven between bites rather than interrupting them, because Dad believes mealtime deserves its own respect.
He tells me about the first inspection he ever ran at the mine, the year I was born, when a section of the eastern tunnel had a drainage problem that nobody had anticipated.
They spent three days knee-deep in standing water with makeshift pumps borrowed from a neighbor’s irrigation system.
He tells the story with a kind of affection, as if it’s something he once hated and chose to love anyway.
Stories I have heard a dozen times—probably more.
“You couldn’t see anything down there,” he says, reaching for his coffee. “Not properly. The lights we had were inadequate. Terrible equipment for what we were trying to do.”
“I remember the good lights,” I say, because I do. “The big ones they put in when I was about seven.”
“Eight,” he corrects immediately, because Dad always corrects dates.
“Eight,” I concede. “I used to love going into the tunnels.”
His expression shifts, softens at the edges in the way it does when he’s remembering something he likes to keep somewhere private. “You were too small to see anything unless I carried you.”
“You used to put me on your shoulders.”
“Your hard hat kept coming off.” He shakes his head, but there’s something warm buried under the exasperation. “You’d lose it in the dark, and I’d spend ten minutes trying to find it while you sat up there telling me I was looking in the entirely incorrect direction.”
“I was usually right.”
“You were occasionally right,” he says, with a gravity that suggests he still considers this a debatable point. “There’s a distinction.”
I laugh, and I catch the way Dad locks the sound away somewhere in his head.
He does that sometimes. Holds onto little things most people would miss because somewhere along the line, he figured out the ordinary moments are the ones that actually matter.
I’ve been aware of it for months. The way he holds certain conversations for a beat longer than he needs to.
The way he watches me cross a room sometimes, as though he’s memorizing the way I move.
I don’t say anything about it.
Because the diagnosis isn’t an end date you can plan around.
It doesn’t give you that kind of mercy.
It’s not a timeline.
It’s not something you can tuck into a planner and pretend you’ll get around to later.
The diagnosis is a doctor sitting across from me in a room that smelled faintly like antiseptic and stale coffee, explaining in calm, practiced tones that pancreatic cancer doesn’t bargain.
It doesn’t stall. It doesn’t care how much land you own or how many deals you still have pending.
The diagnosis is my father nodding once, as if he were being told the weather forecast, then asking if he’d have time to finish the north shaft contracts.
The diagnosis is… him making me promise.
Don’t tell the club.
Not yet.
Let them work. Let them build. Let them not carry this.
The diagnosis is watching the strongest man I’ve ever known start measuring his days in paperwork and pain-management schedules, instead of in excavation permits and what the ground was giving him.
It’s learning how to smile when people ask how he’s doing.
It’s learning how to lie without technically lying.
It’s learning how to carry something so heavy that it changes the way you breathe.
So no.
On Sunday mornings, with lemon bars, coffee, and the muted hum of men who believe the world is stable for at least another day, we are not opening the door to the diagnosis deadline.
Because once it’s open, it will never close again.
He refills his coffee, sets the pot back on the counter, picks up the paper again, and for a little while, there is only the sound of the pan being washed, the paper turning, and people who know how to exist in the same space without filling it unnecessarily.
Then he says it with a kind of careful casualness, like he’s run this moment through his head and decided nonchalance is his best play, “That prospect of Sin’s. The quiet one.”
My hands still in the soapy water for half a second. I keep my voice absolutely level. “Will?”
“Will,” he repeats, as though he didn’t already know his name, as though he hadn’t known his name for two years. “He handled himself well the other night.”
“He did,” I say, and the words come out even, which is something I’ve had to practice, saying Will’s name in front of my father without giving anything away. I’ve gotten very good at it. “He was first through the door.”
“Mmm…” Dad turns another page. “Good man to have around, I’d think.”
I drain the sink and dry my hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven rail. My pulse is a definite flutter. “Yeah,” I say, because saying nothing would be louder than saying something, and saying anything more would be saying too much.
Dad has already returned his full attention to the paper, and his expression gives away precisely nothing, which is how I know he has said everything he intended to say.
I put the pan away while he turns another page.
The kitchen settles back into its Sunday silence. I pick up my coffee mug, looking out the window at the pale February light lying flat and thin across the yard, and I think about the way Will held his hand out in the dark of my father’s office—open and waiting—not making a production of it.
‘A good man to have around.’
I wrap both hands around my mug and hold the warmth there.
By ten-thirty, Dad has claimed his armchair and the rest of the paper, carrying himself like a man who has completed his Sunday duties and earned a morning of authorized comfort.
I can hear him from the kitchen, the soft, occasional crinkle of a page turning, of him simply being present in the next room.
My best friend, Penny, rolls in at ten-forty-seven, which for her basically counts as early.
She smells faintly of eucalyptus and delivers the kind of chaos that seems permanently attached to her.
She owns the flower shop in town and has known me since high school, which means she is firmly outside the orbit of club business and exactly who I need right now.
I pull her through the front door and into the kitchen. “Hey,” I say, at a barely legible volume.
Penny blinks at me, still half in her jacket. “Good morning to you, too. Very normal greeting. Nothing alarming about any of this.”