Chapter Twelve
WILL
The Next Day
I’ve been sitting at the far end of the main table for the better part of an hour, nursing a beer I stopped tasting about forty minutes ago, and watching the front door of the clubhouse with a steady, unhurried patience, like the last few days spent on a sofa in Jonas McClane’s living room have convinced him there are worse ways to exist.
The beer’s gone warm.
I don’t particularly care.
She’ll be here soon.
Not for me.
But to bring the club her baked goods, she’s been working on all morning.
A small smile crosses my lips at the thought of seeing Millie as Sage’s loud voice filters through the clubhouse.
Sage comes to see Marley these days, drops by the clubhouse the way any friend of an Old Lady would, easy and natural, like she belongs in the peripheral edges of this world.
Which, by proximity and association, she increasingly does.
She’s got that quality some people carry around without seeming to notice it, a kind of effortless forward motion, like she’s always moving toward something, and whatever room she walks into simply adjusts around her.
Short blonde hair, easy stride, and a bulk deli bag dropped onto the table with a satisfying thud, packed with jerky and cured meats, that genuinely stops conversation.
Deek looks at it, then at her, then back at it, unusually quiet, like he’s just witnessed something sacred and isn’t sure what to do about it.
Then Deek says to no one in particular, “I think I love her.”
Ghost snorts out a mocking laugh as Deek grabs a stick of meat and gnaws on it like a rabid animal. But Sage doesn’t head for Marley, who is over by the bar talking to Victoria. Sage’s gaze moves across the room, landing on Ghost’s orbit.
And then she gravitates there.
Ghost is installed at his table in the corner, his laptop open, his focus locked on whatever encrypted project he’s currently buried inside.
The man runs his world through a screen like a conductor who prefers to keep the orchestra invisible, and he does it with the same calm efficiency whether the clubhouse is empty or half the chapter is present.
He doesn’t look up when Sage approaches.
He also doesn’t tell her to keep walking.
I take a slow pull of my warm beer and continue to watch.
She drops into the chair beside him uninvited, the same way she always does, with the confident ease of someone who has tested this boundary enough times to have formed a working theory about it.
The paper bag lands on the table between them.
Ghost’s jaw moves fractionally, which for him is roughly the equivalent of rolling out a welcome mat.
“What are you working on?” Sage asks, pulling a stick of jerky from the bag and tearing off a piece with an easy, unhurried calm, like she’s got nowhere else she needs to be.
“Database migration.” Ghost keeps his eyes on the screen.
“Is that code for something criminal, or is it actually as boring as it sounds?”
“Migration of archived data to an encrypted server. Genuinely that boring.”
Sage chews thoughtfully. “Why encrypted?”
He pauses, which, for Ghost, is the conversational equivalent of sitting up straighter. “Because unencrypted storage is an invitation.”
“To what?”
“To anyone who wants to know what you’d prefer, they didn’t.”
She actually thinks about it for a second before jumping in with the first answer that comes to mind, her attention locked on the question. “So, it’s basically a lock on the filing cabinet,” she says. “Except the filing cabinet contains things that would ruin someone’s year.”
Ghost looks at her, a brief, sideways glance, the kind that isn’t quite voluntary, a fractional recalibration. “Something like that,” he says.
“Okay, but here’s what I don’t understand…
” She leans forward with her elbow on the table, and Ghost looks back at the screen, but something about him shifts.
He’s not just sitting there refusing to react anymore.
He’s listening now, whether he wants anyone to notice it or not.
“If you encrypt the server and someone still gets in, you’ve essentially told them that whatever’s inside is worth protecting.
Haven’t you just flagged the most interesting thing in the room? ”
He pauses, and Ghost turns his head, looking at her properly. It lasts about three seconds, which, from a man whose default expression is the conversational equivalent of a blank wall, amounts to something significant.
“That’s a real problem,” he says. “And it’s the reason the architecture needs an additional layer of confusion, so the server itself doesn’t appear to exist.”
“So, the best security is making people believe there’s nothing to find.”
“Correct. I’ll make sure to add that layer of security in.”
Sage nods slowly, a small, satisfied motion. “That tracks for life generally.”
Ghost doesn’t answer. But something in the line of his shoulders shifts by approximately one degree, and he reaches toward the paper bag, extracts some jerky without comment, and sets it on the table beside him.
Neither of them says anything.
But I exhale through my nose.
“They’ve been doing this for months.” Marley’s voice is low, directed sideways. I track it without looking obvious about it, finding her at the bar in conversation with Victoria, both of them with their heads angled in the direction of Ghost’s corner.
Victoria doesn’t even glance up from her drink. “He’s going to crack eventually.”
“Oh, I know,” Marley says, sounding way too pleased with herself, warm and smug in that unmistakable way people get when they’ve been front-row spectators to a slow-burn disaster for months and finally feel vindicated. “I’m just waiting to see who cracks first.”
Victoria makes a sound of agreement, the kind that suggests she has formed her own opinion about the outcome and is keeping it to herself.
I look back toward the corner.
Ghost is eating the jerky. He hasn’t thanked her for it.
Sage hasn’t pointed out that he’s eating the jerky.
They are both pretending this exchange has the mundane, unremarkable texture of two people who happen to occupy the same space, and they do so with the commitment of people who have made this performance a comfortable habit.
There is something almost painfully familiar about watching it.
I set my bottle down and watch for a moment.
Two people who both know damn well something’s happening between them, but keep circling it anyway. Getting close enough to feel the heat before backing off again, the second it starts feeling too real.
Every interaction comes wrapped in just enough plausible deniability to keep anybody from calling it out. Every little moment is balanced carefully on the edge of ‘friendly’ so nobody has to admit what’s actually sitting underneath it.
I know what that looks like from the outside, because I have recently been inside it, and the view from both positions is nearly identical.
Two years.
Two years of it.
The orbit.
The almosts.
The exhaustion of wanting something with a certainty so complete it’s lodged somewhere beneath the ribcage, and still finding a hundred good reasons every single day to keep the appropriate distance.
And then a kitchen table at two in the morning. Her father’s lamp. Her hand across the table, and the way she’d looked at me, stripped back to nothing but Millie, tired, real, fully present, made two years of patient, disciplined distance feel suddenly, almost comically wasteful.
The feel of her fingers threaded through mine stays lodged under my skin.
The mine documents waited.
The paperwork waited.
All of it did, because some things move on their own clock, and no man gets to argue with that.
I find myself watching Ghost reach past his laptop and move his beer a half-inch to the left, making space for Sage’s bag on the table without commenting on the fact that he’s doing it.
Sage notices. She doesn’t say so. She repositions the bag neatly into the cleared space.
There it is.
“You look very philosophical for a man holding a warm beer.” Dad’s voice arrives from my left, unhurried and familiar as gravel underfoot, and I look up to find him settling into the seat across from me with a solemn gravity.
Dad moves like that, deliberate, unhurried, occupying whatever space he enters without feeling the need to announce it.
Deek materializes two seconds later and drops into the chair beside him with enough energy for three people, a fresh beer already in his hand, his eyes bright with the alertness of someone who has recently eaten something good—Sage’s jerky, no doubt.
“Those were an excellent call,” Deek informs me, nodding toward the paper bag in Ghost’s corner. “Sage gets the good ones from that place on Fremont. Ghost’s gonna have to actually acknowledge her at some point. Can’t eat a woman’s jerky every week and stay mysterious. There are rules.”
“There are no rules,” Dad says.
“There are social rules, Dad.”
“There are social conventions that Ghost has been comfortably ignoring since before you were born.”
“And yet he keeps eating the jerky.”
Dad makes a sound that is somewhere between acknowledgment and amusement.
There are mornings, more of them recently, when I catch myself watching Dad and feeling the resonance of a thing you recognize but haven’t had the right words for until the right moment provides them.
He and Jonas have that quality in common, the kind of men who build things slowly and mean them to last. Dad said it to me once while we sat across from each other in the kitchen, completely unaware he was handing me something I’d end up carrying for years.
Two men who built slowly and meant it to last.
“Dad,” I say, and he looks at me, steady, waiting. “You ever regret anything about how the club stuff got started? The years of it?”
Dad drags in a slow breath and sets his beer down on the table.
He doesn’t rush to answer or throw out some easy line to make the conversation smoother.
He sits with the question for a minute instead, really thinking about it before he says a damn thing.
“Some specific choices,” he says at last. “The timing of some things. Not the foundations.” He looks at me in that level way he has, the one that moves past performance and lands straight on the thing you’re actually asking. “Why?”
“Thinking about timing,” I say.
Deek leans sideways and points at Ghost’s corner. “Because of the Sage and Ghost situation, or the Millie situation?”
“Deek,” Dad grumbles.
“I’m asking because they’re related, Dad, philosophically. It’s a legitimate line of inquiry.”
“It’s an intrusive line of inquiry.”
“I prefer invested.” Deek grins at me without apology, easy and uncomplicated, like minding his own business has never really been his thing.
“For what it’s worth, Will, I think you’ve wasted slightly less time than Ghost will.
Which is still a lot of time, objectively, but comparatively?
You’re doing well.” I stare at him. “That was meant to be encouraging,” he adds.
Dad briefly closes his eyes, a gesture of resignation, then opens them and looks at me again. “You don’t need to have it all figured out.” He drops his voice, just for me, slipping past the comedy into something more genuine. “You just need to know what matters.”
I think about Jonas’ kitchen. His lamp. The dark line under his door.
Four more days, I’d thought, sitting there with her hand in mine, already dreading the return to the ordinary rhythm of the clubhouse, the mine documents, and the specific ache of wanting something from a careful, respectful distance.
Except it isn’t like that anymore. Something shifted in the chemistry between us in that kitchen, the unhurried, two-in-the-morning kind of shift that doesn’t make a sound, and it cannot be shifted back.
I reach across and drop a brief hand onto Dad’s shoulder. “Yeah,” I say. “I think I’m starting to.”
He nods once.
Across the room, Ghost says something low, something I can’t hear, and Sage laughs, a sound that startles. Ghost’s expression doesn’t exactly change, but something in the set of his face softens by a fraction that, if you weren’t paying attention, you’d miss entirely.
Deek squints at them like he’s evaluating mechanical failure.
“Someone write this down. Ghost made a woman laugh without technical assistance.”
Dad doesn’t even look up. “You’re exhausting.”
“I’m observant.”
I lift my warm beer and glance toward Ghost’s table, where the mood has shifted into something I’m not used to seeing from him.
My mind drifts to Millie sitting at her kitchen table beneath the lamp glow, her father turning pages in the next room while the mine paperwork sits stacked between them, heavy with everything neither of them wants to say out loud.
Patience means little once you know how things will end.
And I smile into the bottle without meaning to.