Chapter Twenty #3
The tightness in my chest becomes something sharper. “I don’t know if he’s going to be okay,” I admit quietly, the first time I’ve said those words out loud. “He looked… I’ve never seen him like that.”
Another pause. “Then we deal with what’s in front of us,” Sin says. “One step at a time. You focus on being his daughter. Let us handle the rest.”
Sin’s words almost undo me.
“Millie…” My name again, firm but not unkind. “You don’t have to hold everything by yourself… not anymore.”
After this, Sin’s going to find out about Dad’s cancer. It’s inevitable. But maybe he’s right, maybe holding it in isn’t the right thing to do anymore.
I breathe in, slow and shaky. “Okay.”
“Good.” I hear the faint scrape of movement on his end, the sound of him already acting on the decision. “I’ll have someone there in twenty.”
“I don’t need—”
“I know,” he says again. “Still happening.”
A tiny, helpless huff of something that might be a laugh escapes me. “Thank you.”
“Call me if anything changes. No matter what time.”
“I will.”
The line goes silent for a second, neither of us hanging up immediately, the shared understanding sitting between breaths.
Then, he disconnects.
I lower the phone slowly and set it face down on my knee because seeing the screen right now feels like too much information.
The hospital hum continues around me, fluorescent and indifferent, and I sit very still in the plastic chair, hands clasped tight, trying to remember how to breathe without it hurting.
And then I am alone with the machines, the dark March window, and my father, who is here, breathing and alive, but only just, and who fought for forty-nine years to build something worth leaving behind.
I don’t know how much time passes before I start talking. A word, then another, and then the space opens and I am inside it, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees and my voice low enough that the corridor beyond the closed door can’t hear me. “I’m going to run the mine,” I tell him.
His chest rises, then falls.
“I know I told you I didn’t want to be the face of it.
I know I said I was better suited to flour and butter than to gold extraction, and I stand by that…
mostly.” I let out something that is almost a laugh, but not quite.
“But it’s yours. Every vein of ore in that hill has fourteen years of your hands in it, Dad, and you didn’t build it so some shell company or some Alliance accountant could swallow it when you’re gone.
So, I’m gonna run it. I’m going to learn everything I don’t know yet, and the parts I get wrong I’ll get right the next time, and I’ll make you look respectable from whatever chair you end up watching from. ”
His hand rests beside mine on the blanket.
I don’t pick it up, but I do keep talking.
“I’ve been going through Grandma’s recipe book…
the one you gave me. I keep thinking about how long you must’ve known exactly where it was, even if you pretended you didn’t.
I moved it somewhere safe. Somewhere it feels…
looked after.” The monitor keeps its steady rhythm.
“I’ve been cooking from it. The bread on Sunday.
The almond cake I made for you last week.
You said it was good, but you didn’t say good the way you say good when you mean it, you said good the way you say good when you’re being polite, which tells me Grandma Elsa’s almond cake was better than mine, and I’ll accept that. ”
I press my lips together. “I’m going to keep cooking from it, though. Every recipe. Even the ones I get wrong. Especially those.” I sit back in the chair.
The machines keep their vigil. Outside the window, the city is doing what Las Vegas does in the deep part of the night, pushing out its light against the dark, a pale orange glow that never quite lets the sky go completely black.
I’ve never liked March here. Not the lingering cool that hangs on after sunset, but the feeling of the city already building toward something hotter, faster, louder than it is right now.
The feeling is familiar.
I lean forward again. I hear my voice change, the way it drops to something lower, something that has been sitting in my chest for so long it has developed weight.
“I need to tell you something,” I state.
I start at the beginning. “Two years ago…” I say, “… Will Beckett walked into your house to go over the security schedule, I handed him a coffee, and he said thank you, and I thought, oh. That’s what this feels like.”
I look at my father’s face, then the slow rise of his chest. “I didn’t let myself do anything about it.
I know you know that, because you know me and you’ve been watching us circle each other like two people who are both too stubborn to move first, and I know you noticed because you’re you and you notice everything.
You mentioned him twice in the first month, and both times you used exactly the same tone you use when you’re guiding me to a conclusion you’ve already reached and letting me believe I arrived at it independently… I see that now.”
Something moves in my throat, but I keep going. “He used to come over and sit at the kitchen table, and the thing about Will is that he doesn’t need to fill space to be felt. He pays attention when he’s with you. Really pays attention. And somehow that always made the whole room feel steadier.”
My voice thickens, and I press through it. “And we’d talk, and sometimes we wouldn’t talk at all, and both of those things were completely fine. I kept telling myself it wasn’t anything, that I was projecting, that I was lonely, that he was kind, and I was confusing proximity for feeling.”
I breathe in. “I wasn’t confusing anything.”
Outside in the corridor, something moves. Footsteps, stopping. I can’t hear anything beyond the sound of my own voice, finally opening up like a fissure, like ground that has held under pressure for too long.
“He kissed me in the kitchen,” I say, and my voice is barely a voice anymore, just the bare truth of it stripped down to nothing else.
“He was standing there looking at me like he was trying so hard not to, and it just… well, happened. And then he kissed me again on the porch because the night was cold, and his shoulder was right there, and I thought if I didn’t kiss him again, I was going to carry it forever. ”
My throat tightens around the memory. “Will kissed me back, and then he did this thing where he set his forehead against mine and said he needed three more days, and Dad, I have never wanted three days to pass so badly in my entire life.”
I laugh, thin and broken. “He got his three days. He was about to get his patch, and then he was arrested for something he didn’t do, and none of it was fair, and the timing of all of it was so far beyond anyone’s control that I can’t even be angry at a specific thing, I can just stand in the middle of it and feel the weight. ”
My hands find my own knees, and I press down.
“I love him.” The words come out small. But they aren’t small.
“I love him, and I’ve never said that out loud to anyone, not even to Penny, and I’m telling you now because you’re my father and you’ve always deserved the truth from me and I was too scared of what it would mean, too scared of anything that might complicate the arrangement with the club, too scared that you’d think less of me for letting it happen while you were sick, while everything else was happening, while you needed me to be s-steady. ” My voice breaks.
“I was going to tell you when the timing was r-right.” The words snag halfway out, splintering against the back of my teeth.
“Then Will was arrested, and you’re here, and there is no right timing, there never was, and I—” My breath shudders, sharp and shallow.
“I’m sorry I waited. I’m sorry I carried it like it was something I could just… manage.”
My throat closes. I swallow hard, but it doesn’t help, and the next words scrape on the way out.
“I’m sorry he said it to me, and I didn’t say it b-back.
” My voice breaks, completely, the sound collapsing into something wrecked.
“And now he’s in a jail cell thinking I don’t love h-him.
” The last word fractures. I don’t even hear the rest of the sentence leave me.
I fold forward without meaning to, my forehead finding the thin hospital blanket beside his hand. The fabric smells strongly of antiseptic. My fingers curl into the sheet as though I can anchor myself to something solid if I hold tight enough.
For a second, there is nothing. Just the violent pressure behind my ribs, the sensation of something rising that has nowhere to go.
A sound tears out of me, low and raw, dragged up from somewhere I’ve spent years sealing off. My shoulders hitch, and another breath comes in crooked and useless. I press my mouth harder against the blanket, but it doesn’t stop the noise—it only muffles it into something animal and unrecognizable.
My chest convulses, and my lungs refuse to cooperate.
Tears spill hot and relentless, soaking into the cotton beneath my cheek.
I clutch at his hand as if I might lose him if I loosen my grip even slightly, like the machines around us are the only thing holding him tethered to this world, and I am somehow responsible for keeping them working.
“I can’t do this,” I choke, though I don’t know if I mean the illness, the fear, or the waiting. “I can’t watch you disappear.”
The monitors keep their steady rhythm.
My body trembles through wave after wave until the force of it drains out, leaving only the dull ache of the aftermath.
The sobs thin to ragged inhales. The tears slow but don’t stop.
I stay curled beside him with my forehead pressed into the mattress, because the second I lift my head and look at him properly, this becomes real… and I’m not ready for that yet.
Eventually, the shaking fades into smaller aftershocks. I drag air into my lungs and hold it there until the dizziness passes. My sleeve is damp when I swipe at my face, and my eyes burn.
I sit back up because there is nothing else to do.
His chest rises, then falls.
I stare at the movement like it’s the only thing that matters.
“Okay,” I whisper, though the word feels fragile as glass. “Okay.”
Suddenly, the door opens. I turn, expecting a nurse, and find Deek, Will’s older brother.
He’s still in his cut, which means he came straight from wherever he was, and there’s something about him as he steps into the room that is slightly different from the carefree Deek I know.
He’s a fraction less easy, a fraction more careful, in the way someone moves when they have been standing still for a while and are deciding how to begin again.
He meets my eyes, and for just a moment, his expression does something complicated that he smooths over quickly, something shifting behind the familiar grin that surfaces to replace it.
“Hey.” He exhales like he’s been holding his breath the entire drive. “How’s your dad?”
“Stable,” I say. My voice is wrecked, and I don’t try to pretend otherwise.
Deek nods slowly, looking at my father, and his throat works once.
Then he pulls up the other chair, the one against the wall, sets it beside mine, and sits down in it like he intends to stay, which I already know he does, because this is what Deek does.
He stays. Beneath all the commentary and the running jokes, beneath the bravado and the weaponized cheerfulness, he completely stays.
“Sin said you called,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Glad you did.” He rests his forearms on his knees, eyes forward on my father’s face. “Figured you shouldn’t be alone in a hospital at three in the morning if I could help it… my brother would kill me if I didn’t step up and help out his girl.”
‘His girl.’
I look at the side of his face. He is watching Dad with an expression I have seen on very few people in my life, one that recognizes the quality of this kind of vigil, the weight of sitting beside someone who is here and may not always be.
“Thank you,” I simply say.
Deek nods once and doesn’t say anything else, and we sit there together under the harsh fluorescent light, machines humming, darkness pressed up against the window, and I’m grateful down to my core that I’m not alone in the room.