CHAPTER FIVE
"How's he doing." Thane's voice is low, pitched for the empty corridor, careful in the way people get careful around hospitals even when the crisis has already passed.
"Stable. Stents went in clean, they're saying he got lucky.
" I lean back against the wall opposite him, suddenly aware of exactly how tired I am, adrenaline finally burning off and leaving something heavier behind.
"He's already trying to recruit me for a permanent nursing position at County.
Give it two days, he'll have a whole pitch prepared. "
Something that's almost a laugh moves through Thane, quiet, familiar, the specific sound I used to fall asleep to on nights we stayed up too late. "Sounds like him. Man had a heart attack twelve hours ago and he's already running an angle."
"He comes by it honestly. You're all like that."
"Guilty." He studies me for a moment, something more serious settling into his expression. "You look exhausted, Niamh. Genuinely, not as an insult."
"I drove three hours in the rain and then relearned how to be a daughter in the space of one hospital visit. I think exhausted is generous."
He nods slowly, and there's a beat where neither of us says anything, the hallway's fluorescent hum filling the space where words should be.
I notice, in the quiet, how careful he's being with the physical distance between us, exactly one respectful arm's length, close enough to talk without raising his voice, far enough that neither of us has to acknowledge how badly some part of me wants that distance gone.
"The room at the clubhouse is ready," he says finally.
"Sela mentioned it to you already, I heard.
But I want you to actually hear it from me too.
It's not charity, and it's not an obligation.
Your dad's house has been closed up for months, pipes probably need checking before anyone should sleep there, and I don't. I don't like the idea of you alone in an empty house tonight, after everything today. "
"That's not your call to make."
"I know it isn't." No defensiveness in it, just quiet acknowledgment. "I'm not making it for you. I'm just telling you the door's open, same as everyone else told you tonight. What you do with that is yours."
I study him for a long moment, looking for the angle, the agenda, some proof that this offer comes with strings I haven't spotted yet. I don't find one. That's almost more unsettling than if I had.
"Fine," I say finally, surprising myself as much as him. "The clubhouse. Just for tonight, until I figure out the house situation."
Something eases in his shoulders, small but visible. "I'll walk you out. Gilda's staying with your dad overnight, she already told the nurses she's not going anywhere."
The drive back to the clubhouse happens in two separate cars, mine trailing his taillights through rain that's finally started to thin into something closer to mist, and by the time we pull into the lot the meeting has clearly broken up, most of the bikes gone, only a handful of lights still on inside.
He leads me through the garage bay, past the oak table now empty and quiet, Ravinia's jacket gone from the chair, no evidence left of the confrontation that happened here a few hours ago except the specific, lingering weight of it still sitting in my chest. Down a short hallway I don't fully remember, past doors I never had reason to open when I lived here, to a small room that used to be storage, judging by the leftover shelving still bolted to one wall, now converted into something plain and serviceable, a bed, a dresser, a lamp already switched on and casting warm light across sheets that smell faintly of fabric softener, clearly new, clearly prepared with care.
"It's not much," Thane says, hovering in the doorway with my bag still in his hand, like he's not quite ready to hand it over and end the conversation. "But it's dry and it's quiet, and nobody's going to bother you back here."
"It's fine. It's more than fine." I take the bag from him, and our fingers brush for half a second in the handoff, brief and accidental and entirely too loud in my nervous system for something so small. "Thank you. For today. For all of it, honestly. I wasn't expecting."
"Kindness?" A ghost of a smile, self aware in a way that surprises me.
"Something like that."
He nods, and for a moment neither of us moves, the small room holding us both in a silence that feels different from the one in the hospital hallway, closer, more dangerous, the kind of quiet that used to precede something neither of us was ever brave enough to name out loud back then either.
"Get some sleep," he says finally, stepping back into the hallway. "Tomorrow's going to want a version of you that's actually rested."
"Thane." His name stops him halfway turned, and I don't fully know what I mean to say until it's already coming out of me. "Thank you for staying at the hospital. You didn't have to wait in that hallway."
Something flickers across his face, quick and unguarded before he catches it. "I wasn't going to leave until I knew you were alright. Some habits don't go away just because three years did."
He's gone before I can find an answer to that, footsteps receding down the hallway toward the garage bay, and I stand in the doorway of this small, borrowed room for a long moment after he's out of sight, listening to the building settle into its late night quiet around me.
I don't sleep for a while, lying on top of the covers still in my clothes, staring at a ceiling I've never seen before in a building I know better than any other place on earth.
Somewhere down the hall I can hear low voices, Gunnar and someone else, the specific rhythm of a clubhouse winding down for the night, familiar in a way that lands somewhere between comfort and ache.
Around midnight, unable to settle, I get up and follow the sound past my door, drawn by something I don't examine too closely, and find the garage bay dim and mostly empty, one work lamp burning gold over the far bay where a bike sits half disassembled on its stand.
Thane is there, sleeves pushed up, hands dark with grease, working on the engine with the same unhurried focus I remember from a hundred nights just like this one, except every single thing about tonight is different, three years different, and I stand in the doorway watching him work, unnoticed for one more suspended second, before he glances up and finds me there, and something in his expression tells me he isn't surprised at all to see me standing in this exact spot.
"Couldn't sleep either," he says. Not a question.
"Not really." I step further into the garage bay, the concrete cold even through my socks, the smell of motor oil and metal so familiar it aches somewhere behind my sternum. "This used to be the only place in the building loud enough to drown out my own thoughts. Guess some things don't change."
"You used to sit right there." He nods toward an overturned crate near the workbench, worn smooth at one corner from years of use. "Homework, back when you were still in school. Then later, just to keep me company on the nights I couldn't sleep either."
"I remember." I sit down on the crate anyway, testing whether the memory still fits, and it does, uncomfortably well, my knees drawn up the same way they always used to, watching him work the way I must have watched him work a hundred times before, back when neither of us had anything more complicated between us than the easy, dangerous comfort of two people who understood each other without trying.
He goes back to the engine for a few minutes, hands steady, methodical, and I let the silence stretch, content for once to just watch him work instead of filling the space with something safer.
The wrench catches the lamplight each time he turns it, and I find myself cataloging the small differences three years have made, a callus that wasn't there before, the new tattoo at his collar I glimpsed earlier now more visible with his sleeves pushed up, dark ink curling down toward his forearm.
"New ink," I say, before I can decide whether it's a safe thing to comment on.
He glances down at his own arm like he'd half forgotten it was there. "Yeah. Got it the year after you left." He doesn't elaborate, and I don't ask, though the specific timing sits between us anyway, heavy with everything neither of us is saying.
"Ravinia seems kind," I say instead, testing a different kind of dangerous ground, watching his hands for any change in rhythm.
They still, just slightly, before continuing. "She is. Genuinely." A pause, careful. "It's not what you probably think it is, between us. Not entirely."
"You don't have to explain that to me."
"I know I don't." He sets the wrench down, finally looking at me fully instead of at the engine between us, grease smudged along his jaw, exhaustion and something more complicated written into the lines around his eyes.
"I want to anyway. Someday. Not tonight.
Tonight I just want to sit in this garage with you for twenty minutes and pretend it's simpler than it is. "
The honesty of it lands somewhere unguarded in my chest, and for a moment I let myself imagine exactly that, twenty easy minutes, no chair, no fiancée, no three years of silence sitting between us like a wall neither of us has found the door in yet.
It's tempting in a way that frightens me more than any argument could.
"I should go back to bed," I say instead, standing before the temptation can win out over the caution that's kept me alive for three years. "Early start tomorrow. Hospital, probably the whole day."
Something flickers across his face, disappointment carefully smoothed over almost as fast as it appears.
"Yeah. Of course." He picks the wrench back up, giving his hands something to do, giving us both permission to end this the way we started it, careful, unfinished, three years of practice at not finishing things fully intact between us.
"Goodnight, Thane."
"Night, Niamh." He doesn't look up again as I go, and I don't look back either, though I can hear the wrench against metal start up again almost the second I'm through the door, steady and unhurried, the sound following me all the way down the hallway to the small borrowed room where I lie awake for a long time afterward, listening to him still working below, both of us awake in the same building for the first time in three years, both of us, I suspect, thinking about exactly the same thing and choosing, for tonight, not to say so.