Chapter 4
FOUR
DANIEL
I woke up on Ellie’s couch at half-past six to the particular quality of silence that meant someone else in the house was already awake and had been for a while. It was the kind of silence that had weight to it. Occupied silence. Thinking silence.
The couch was not designed for a man of my size.
It was one of those narrow, decorative things that looked comfortable enough to sit on but had clearly never been intended for sleeping, and certainly not for sleeping six-foot-two of firefighter.
I had a crick in my neck that was going to make itself known for the next two days, and my left foot had gone completely to sleep somewhere around four in the morning, but I’d been too tired and too unwilling to move to do anything about it.
I lay there for a moment, staring up at the ceiling with its faint water stain in the corner that had been there since the winter before last, listening to the stillness of the house settle around me.
The faint ticking of a kettle past the boil told me Ellie was already up.
I sat up, ran both hands over my face, and went to find her.
She was at the kitchen table.
She was still in most of the clothes she’d been wearing yesterday, though she’d traded the work trousers for whatever she’d found first in the dark, which appeared to be an old pair of flannel sleep pants covered in small yellow ducks that I had seen many times before and had historically taken great pleasure in giving her grief about.
Her hair was down and slightly wrecked from what little sleep she’d managed, pulled free of whatever she’d tied it back with and falling around her face in a way she hadn’t bothered to fix.
She had both hands wrapped around a mug like it was the only warm thing left in the world, and she was staring at the middle distance with the focused, hollow look of someone who had been sitting in exactly that position, with exactly that one thought, for a long time.
The mug had stopped steaming.
“How long have you been up?” I asked.
She blinked slowly and brought her eyes to me, like she was returning from somewhere far off. “A while.”
“Did you sleep at all?”
A pause. The kind of pause that told me everything I needed to know. “Some,” she said, in a way that meant almost none.
I moved to her kettle without waiting to be asked—it was still warm, which told me she hadn’t been up quite as long as I’d feared—and made myself a cup of coffee from the emergency stash of coffee bags she kept in the back of the cabinet specifically because I was here often enough that it had become a necessity.
It was automatic, the same way breathing was automatic, to make a fresh cup of tea for her while I was at it, to drop the bag in, to set the timer in my head the way I knew she liked it.
When both cups were done, I carried them to the table and sat down across from her, nudging the fresh mug into the space between her hands and waiting until I felt her fingers close around it before I let go.
She watched me do all of this with the slightly unfocused attention of someone running on fumes and sheer stubbornness in roughly equal measure, as if she was aware something kind was happening but didn’t quite have the bandwidth to respond to it.
We sat for a moment without speaking. Outside, the early morning light came in gray and thin through the kitchen window, pale and noncommittal and quiet.
“Tell me what he said,” I said. “The real version. Not the hallway version.”
She looked down at her mug. “The hallway version was accurate.”
“Ellie.”
She was quiet for another beat before something in her shoulders shifted a little. Her long, slow exhale seemed to come from somewhere deep down, somewhere she’d been holding tight since last night, and she told me all of it.
I stayed silent because I knew better than to say anything until she was finished.
“He asked me not to let fear talk me out of something real,” she said finally.
Her voice had gone quiet and a little rough around the edges.
She turned her mug in a slow circle on the table, eyes following the motion.
“After that, he fell asleep right in front of me, just like that, and I sat there for another hour not knowing what to do with any of it. And then I came home and apparently did not sleep.”
I looked at her across the table. Her eyes had the red-rimmed, over-bright quality of exhaustion pushed well past its sensible limit, the particular rawness that came not from crying but from not sleeping and holding too much inside for too long.
She’d been carrying all of this since yesterday—the drive to the hospital, the waiting room, the prognosis delivered in that careful clinical voice that Ray used when he was being kind—and then this, on top of all of it.
Her grandfather’s last request, sitting on her chest like something she couldn’t put down and couldn’t carry comfortably either.
I thought about Gus the way he’d looked in that bed.
Smaller than I’d ever seen him. The monitor clipped to his finger, the IV taped into his arm, the hospital blanket pulled up in a way that somehow made him seem diminished, which felt wrong in a way I couldn’t quite articulate because Gus Granger had never once in my memory looked diminished by anything.
He was a man who had never seemed afraid of much.
And he was lying there afraid of one specific thing.
I thought about Ellie’s face in the waiting room before we’d gone in.
The way her jaw had tightened, the particular chin-lift she’d been doing since we were eight years old to keep herself from coming apart, the thing she thought nobody could read.
The way she’d said I’m not ready with her eyes fixed on the middle distance, like the words had been pulled out of her from somewhere she hadn’t meant to leave unguarded.
I turned my mug slowly in my hands and didn’t say anything for a long moment, because something was assembling itself in the back of my mind, piece by piece, and I wanted to see the whole shape of it before I said it out loud.
“What if we—gave him what he wants?” I said.
Ellie looked up from her mug. “What?”
“What he wants. What would make him stop being scared.” I kept my voice steady, following the logic of it. “What if we told him we’re together?”
She stared at me. “Daniel—”
“Not forever,” I said. “Just for now. For him.” I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table, closing the distance between us. “He’s got a week, Ray said. Maybe less. What if he spent that time not afraid? What if we just—let him have that?”
“You’re talking about lying to him.”
“I’m talking about giving him something real to hold onto.” I heard how that sounded and kept going before she could find the seam in it. “He’s not wrong that I love you. He’s not wrong that I show up. We’d just be rearranging which kind of love it is. Temporarily.”
She was looking at me with the expression she got when she hadn’t decided yet whether something was brilliant or completely unhinged and was doing the necessary work of figuring out which.
“He’d want to see evidence, Daniel. He’s not going to take our word for it and be satisfied.
You know what he’d want.” She stopped. Something shifted in her face.
“He’d want us to get married. That’s what he’s been saying for ten years. ”
“I know.”
“So that’s not—we can’t just—“ She caught something in my expression and stilled. “No.”
“Hear me out.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Ellie. Listen.”
She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest, which I had learned over the course of a lifetime to read as fine, talk, but I reserve the right to think this is completely insane. It was as much permission as I was likely to get, so I took it.
“Marriage licenses in Alabama,” I said. “Do you know how they work?”
A beat of silence. “...No.”
“Hollywood’s been looking into it, because he and Lucy are getting close to actually tying the knot.
” She opened her mouth, and I kept going before she could redirect me.
“You get the license. You do the ceremony. But the license doesn’t get filed until afterward—the officiant sends it in.
Which means there’s a window between when the ceremony happens and when the paperwork gets filed.
” I held her gaze across the table. “We do the ceremony for Gus. We intercept the paperwork before it goes anywhere. Nobody files anything. And he gets to spend whatever time he has left believing his granddaughter is taken care of.”
The kitchen quiet pressed in closer, like a silent audience fascinated by this spectacle of insanity.
Ellie stared at me from across the table, working through it, the way I’d seen her work through hard things since we were children—the part where she wanted to dismiss it outright, and the part where the logic of it caught her before she could, and then underneath both of those, the part where the grief made even a genuinely insane idea start to look like solid ground.
“That is,” she said slowly, “genuinely the most reckless thing you have ever suggested to me. And Daniel, that is a high bar.”
“This is completely different.”
“It really isn’t.”
“Ellie.” I leaned forward again, closing what little distance the table allowed. “He’s scared. You’re gutted. I can fix one of those things. Possibly both of them.” I held her eyes and didn’t let go. “Let me fix it.”
God, I needed to fix this for her. It was a physical thing, that need, sitting somewhere in the center of my chest and pressing outward.
She looked at me for a long moment with an expression I couldn’t entirely read, which was unusual enough—rare enough—that I stilled and waited and didn’t push.
Something moved across her face. Something that wasn’t quite agreement but was the beginning of something close to it.
The moment a thing that looks impossible starts to look merely improbable, which in my experience was usually close enough.
“We’d have to be convincing,” she said quietly. “He’d see through anything that wasn’t.”
“We’ve been pretending not to be in love for ten years,” I said. “We can probably manage the reverse.”
The words were out before I’d thought them all the way through, before I’d decided whether to say them at all. Her face froze as they landed. For one full second neither of us said a single thing, and the silence in the kitchen had a different kind of weight to it than it had before.
She looked back down at her mug, and I let it go, folded it up and filed it somewhere in the back of my mind where I’d examine it later, when there was room.
“Okay,” she said. Quiet. Certain enough. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
She didn’t sound entirely sure, and honestly, neither was I.
But across the table from me she’d lifted her chin, just a fraction, and underneath all the exhaustion and the grief and the sleepless night sitting in her eyes, there was something else.
Something that looked almost like relief.
Like she’d been waiting without knowing it for someone to hand her a way forward, however crooked it turned out to be.
We’d figure out the rest as we went. We always had.