CHAPTER THREE
It's Gunnar who breaks it, in the end, not Thane, not me.
He pushes back from the table, chair legs scraping loud against concrete, and crosses the room in a handful of long strides before I've fully registered he's moving at all.
Then his arms are around me, quick and rough and entirely unsentimental in the way I remember, the kind of hug that says more than any of the words he isn't saying yet.
"Damn, Hargrove." His voice is muffled against my wet hair, and I can feel him shaking his head. "Three years and you still know how to walk into a room and stop it dead."
It's not comfort exactly. It's better than comfort. It's normal, ordinary, the exact register I didn't know I needed until he gave it to me, and something in my chest that's been clenched since I saw Gilda's name on my phone this morning loosens by one small, crucial degree.
"Good to see you too," I manage, and it comes out rougher than I mean it to.
He pulls back, hands still on my shoulders, giving me a once over the way a brother would, checking for damage. "You look like hell. Good hell. Ran a marathon hell."
"Drove three hours in the rain hell."
"That tracks." He glances past me toward the door, toward the rain still coming down hard enough to hear through steel. "You heading to County?"
"That's the plan."
"Good." He squeezes my shoulder once, hard, the way he used to when we were both younger and he'd just watched me talk down some drunk prospect from doing something stupid.
"He's going to want to see your face more than he's going to want to see mine, and believe me, I've been sitting with him plenty. "
"How bad was it? This morning, I mean. When you found him."
Something shifts behind Gunnar's eyes, the easy humor dimming for a second.
"Bad enough that I don't want to talk about it twice in one day.
He's stable now. That's what matters." He says it like a door closing gently, and I let it close, because I understand exactly what it costs to relive a thing like that out loud, and I'm not about to make him pay that cost twice for my benefit.
Ravinia has come around the table by now, closer than she was, and up close she's even more disarming than she looked from across the room, dark eyes steady and kind in a way I wasn't braced for. She extends her hand before I've fully processed that she's moving at all.
"You must be Niamh." Her voice is warm, no edge to it, no territorial chill, just plain, direct courtesy that lands harder than hostility would have. "I'm Ravinia. I'm so sorry about your father. I hope he's going to be alright."
I shake her hand because there's nothing else to do with mine.
Her grip is firm, brief, the handshake of someone raised to run a room of her own someday.
Up close, she's even harder to hate on sight than she was from the doorway, which feels like its own small betrayal of everything I braced myself for on the drive here.
I came prepared for a rival. I wasn't prepared for someone I might actually like under different circumstances, in a different life, in a version of this story where she isn't sitting in the one chair in the world that used to hold my whole sense of who I was.
"Thank you." Two words. I don't trust myself with more.
"I mean it," Ravinia adds, quieter now, just for me, something almost apologetic threaded through it that I don't fully understand yet. "This can't be an easy day to walk back into all of this. I imagine it's a lot, on top of everything else."
It's such a specific thing to say, all of this, like she already understands there's more weight in this room than a sick father alone, and I file the observation away without knowing yet what to do with it.
Either she's simply perceptive, or someone has already told her more about me than I would have chosen to share myself.
Thane is fully standing now, hands loose at his sides in a way that looks deliberate, like he's making a visible effort not to reach for me, not to close the distance the way every line of his body seems to want to.
Around us, the room has started to breathe again, low conversations picking back up at the far end of the table, everyone giving us the fiction of privacy in a room that has none.
"He's stable," Thane says, and I understand he means my father, understand he's giving me the information he knows I need most before anything else, the same way he's always known what I need before I ask for it, even now, even after everything.
"They caught it fast. Gunnar found him collapsed in the garage this morning, called it in himself. "
I look at Gunnar. He shrugs, like finding my father unconscious on a concrete floor was simply Tuesday, though something in his eyes says otherwise, says he's still shaking off the fear of that particular hour.
"Gilda's with him now," Thane continues. "I can take you over, or."
"I remember the way." It comes out sharper than I mean it, three years of careful distance collapsing into one defensive sentence, and I watch something flicker across his face, not hurt exactly, more like recognition, like he expected exactly this and braced for it anyway.
"Right." He nods once, jaw tightening almost imperceptibly. "Of course you do."
There's nothing accusatory in it, which somehow makes it worse. I have the sudden, disorienting urge to apologize, though I couldn't say for what exactly, the sharpness or the three years or something older and less nameable than either.
"Room's ready for you, whenever you need it.
" This from a woman I don't immediately recognize, older, silver threaded through dark hair pulled back in a braid, standing near the coffee station with an expression I can't fully read.
It takes me a second to place her, one of the newer old ladies, someone who must have joined the family after I left.
"Gilda had us make up the guest room off the kitchen.
Didn't figure you'd want to stay at your dad's place alone, not with him in the hospital and the house standing empty. "
The kindness of it, the specific, practical thoughtfulness, catches me sideways in a way the confrontation I was braced for never could have.
I hadn't even thought that far ahead, hadn't considered where I'd sleep tonight, and the fact that someone here had already solved that problem for me, quietly, without asking, undoes something small and stubborn in my chest.
"Thank you," I say again, and this time I mean it more fully.
I look at the chair one more time before I turn to go, at Ravinia's jacket still draped over the back of it, at the small, ordinary cruelty of a stranger occupying the one seat that used to be the whole shape of my belonging in this room.
She catches me looking. Something passes over her face, not guilt, not quite apology, something more complicated than either, like she understands exactly what she's sitting in and has already made some private peace with the fact that she didn't choose the position she's in any more than I chose to leave mine empty.
"Go see your dad," Gunnar says, gentler now. "We'll be here."
We'll be here. Not you should stay, not we missed you, nothing that asks anything of me yet.
Just an open door, offered without conditions, and I understand, walking back out into the rain, that it might be the most dangerous thing anyone's said to me all day, because a door that stays open is so much harder to walk away from than one that's already closed.
Thane follows me as far as the threshold, close enough that I can feel the specific warmth of him even through the cold coming off the open door, close enough that three years compress down to nothing for one unguarded second.
He stops a careful arm's length away, hands in his pockets now, like he's given himself a rule and is determined to keep it.
"Niamh." Just my name again, quieter this time, meant only for me. "I'm glad you came."
Not glad to see you. Not I missed you. Glad you came, like he's already braced for the possibility that I might not stay, like even now, standing three feet away from me for the first time in three years, some part of him is already preparing for the version of tonight where I get back in my car and disappear again before morning.
I don't answer. I don't trust what would come out if I tried. I just nod, once, and step out into the rain, and I don't let myself look back to see whether he's still standing in the doorway watching me go, though every instinct I have tells me exactly what I'd find if I did.
The drive to County takes eleven minutes I spend gripping the wheel too tight, replaying the whole encounter in fragments, Gunnar's hug, Ravinia's handshake, the specific, careful distance in Thane's voice that didn't quite manage to hide what was underneath it.
I don't know what I expected walking back into that clubhouse.
Anger, maybe. Something clean and simple I could hold onto.
Instead I got kindness from a rival I can't bring myself to resent, and a president who still looks at me like I'm something he's trying not to startle, and an open door I have absolutely no idea what to do with.
The hospital parking lot is nearly empty at this hour, sodium lights buzzing overhead, rain streaking the windshield in sheets I have to squint through to find a spot.
I sit for a moment once the engine's off, hands still on the wheel, and remind myself why I'm actually here, underneath all of it, the club, the chair, the man I still haven't let myself fully look at.
I catch my own reflection in the rearview mirror before I get out, mascara gone faintly smudged from the rain, jaw set in the same braced expression I wear into every trauma bay, and I almost laugh at myself, at the absurdity of needing a professional face for my own father.
But it's the only face I trust to get me through a hospital corridor right now, so I put it on properly, the way I'd put on gloves, and I get out of the car.
The automatic doors sigh open ahead of me, fluorescent light spilling out onto the wet pavement, and somewhere beyond the front desk, past a hallway I haven't walked in three years, my father is inside these walls, alive, asking for me.
Everything else has to wait.