Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“Ghost has everything,” Sin says. “Maria’s been across the evidence chain since yesterday.
The detective running the case is a good cop, and what Ghost found is not something he can look past. We even have the new name of the head of the Alliance.
Some asshole called Roman is calling the shots now.
Not for long, though. But Millie… Will’s being released this morning. ”
I close my eyes and press them tight, tipping my head back against the glass. The information moves through me, flooding every place that has been braced, since the moment I stood in the clubhouse parking lot and watched the police take him away. “This morning?” I ask to make sure.
“This morning,” Sin confirms. “We’ll be there.”
I breathe for a moment. In, and all the way out. “Good. That’s good.” I straighten and look out the window at the parking lot below, the ordinary, unremarkable activity of people coming and going from their own crises. “Sin, there’s something else.”
He hesitates. “I’m listening.”
“Dad didn’t just have a heart issue… he’s sick, real sick.”
Sin sighs down the line. “I know. Will told me the day of his ceremony.”
I widen my eyes in shock. Not in anger, just a little jilted that Will said anything. “Oh…” is all I can manage.
“Don’t be pissed at him, Mills. You put him in a hell of a spot.
And I get why you didn’t want us knowing.
It’s personal. But Will’s got a duty to the club too, and there was no way he was getting patched in while keeping something this big from us.
It was the right call for his patch. Doesn’t mean it didn’t tear him up breaking his word to you.
Trust me, he didn’t want to tell me. He held onto that secret right up until the eleventh hour, if that helps at all. ”
Slumping my shoulders, I nod, even though Sin can’t see me. It does help. “I’m sorry we didn’t tell you.”
Sin makes a clicking sound with his tongue. “Hey, we all process things differently. It’s a shit of a thing, Mills.”
My eyes begin to mist, my bottom lip quivering as I think about what it all means.
So, I shake my head, gathering my emotions, and move on.
“The documents,” I say. “The ones I collected from the mine office the night the Alliance scouts breached the perimeter. I’ve had them in my bag for weeks, and I haven’t opened them.
” I hear him absorb this without interruption.
“There’s a letter from Dad. There are instructions.
He mentioned before everything went sideways that he’d been to see his lawyer, that things were ‘in order,’ and I think whatever he means by that, whatever he’s set up, it’s referenced in those documents.
” I stop for a moment to sort through what I know and what I’m guessing at.
“I don’t know what’s in them, Sin. But he told me once, a long time ago, that I’d know when the time was right to open them. ”
Sin is silent for a moment, and when he speaks, his voice is measured and deliberate. “And you think the time is right?”
I look back down the corridor toward my father’s room, where he is sleeping, and where I sat up all night talking to him about everything I thought he couldn’t hear.
The man who built a mine from grief and kept his daughter’s name off a criminal organization’s radar for years by bleeding money he didn’t have, who sat in his armchair watching Will for two weeks and turned his television up one increment, who lay in this bed and told me to ‘Go get him.’
“I think the time is right,” I say.
“Bring them in when you’re ready,” Sin says. “We’ll go through them together. Ghost, you, me.”
“Okay.” I exhale. “Thank you, Sin. For all of it. For Will, for last night, for—”
“Millie.” His voice is certain, carrying the same kind of weight my father poured into building the mine, earned slowly and at a cost most people never saw. “That’s what we do… we’re family.”
I stand at the corridor window for a little while after we end the call, watching the city go about its morning below me, listening to the ordinary sounds of the floor behind me, the soft footsteps of nurses, the distant muffled conversation, the steady, unremarkable beeping from behind my father’s door.
My bag is on the chair beside his bed.
The documents are inside it.
I’ve been carrying them like a stone in a pocket, aware of their weight at every moment, waiting for the degree of gravity to tell me they were ready to be opened.
I have learned this from my father, that some things don’t benefit from being forced, that the right time has a feeling to it, and that you know it when you’re in it.
I think I’m in it.
I walk back down the corridor, Deek letting out a slight snore as I pass him. I smirk as I push open the door quietly so as not to disturb him, and cross to the chair beside my father’s bed. The bag is where I left it. I take a seat and settle it on my knees, then open the outer pocket.
My father breathes steadily in the bed beside me.
His hand is resting on the blanket, the hand that built everything I’ve ever stood on. I reach over and rest mine over his, gently, so gently I don’t disturb him. Then I reach back into the bag with my free hand and pull out the documents.
I sit here in the pale hospital morning with my father’s hand under mine, and the weight of whatever he prepared for me held in my other hand…
I begin, at last, to read.