CHAPTER EIGHT
The clubhouse is quiet when we get back, the kind of quiet that comes after a full day of adrenaline finally draining out of a building, most members gone home or off on errands, only the low murmur of a television somewhere and the smell of something simmering on the stove drifting from the kitchen.
Thane disappears into the back office almost immediately, muttering something about needing to actually call Odric's people before Friday becomes a promise he can't keep, and I'm left standing in the garage bay alone with the oak table and three years of unanswered questions.
I find Gilda in the kitchen exactly where I expect her to be, stirring something that smells like her chicken and rice, the same recipe she's made every Tuesday for as long as I can remember, wooden spoon moving in the same unhurried rhythm as always.
"You look like you've had a day," she says without turning around, somehow already aware of my presence the way she's always been aware of everything in this building.
"That's generous phrasing." I lean against the counter, watching her work, the domesticity of it easing something tight in my chest that's been wound since the diner.
"Dax's arm, the merger call, lunch with Thane that got interrupted right when it was actually going somewhere. Pick your favorite disaster."
"Sounds like a full day, alright." She glances at me over her shoulder, something knowing in her expression. "You want to ask me something. I can tell. You've had that particular look on your face since you got back."
There's no point pretending otherwise with Gilda. She's spent forty years reading rooms full of men who don't say what they mean, and I've never once successfully hidden anything from her, not even as a teenager sneaking in past curfew.
"The chair," I say finally, the question I've been circling since I saw Ravinia's jacket draped over the back of it yesterday. "Why is it still there. Why didn't anyone just give it to someone else, three years ago. It's been long enough."
Gilda sets the spoon down, turns to face me fully, and something in her posture shifts into the particular seriousness she reserves for conversations that matter.
"Nobody ever gave an order about it, if that's what you're asking.
Thane never said don't let anyone sit there.
He didn't have to." She wipes her hands on her apron, unhurried, choosing her words with the care of someone who's thought about this exact conversation before it happened.
"This club runs on things nobody says out loud half the time.
Everyone just understood that chair wasn't up for grabs.
Not because anyone thought you were coming back.
Because leaving it empty felt like the only right thing to do, whether or not you ever walked back through that door. "
"That doesn't make sense." My voice comes out thinner than I intend. "Nobody knew if I was coming back. I didn't know if I was coming back."
"Doesn't have to make sense to be true." Gilda's eyes are steady on mine, kind but unflinching.
"Grief doesn't always make sense either, honey, and that's what this club's been carrying since Everhart, and since you left right on the heels of it.
Two losses stacked on top of each other.
Leaving that chair alone was the only way some of us knew how to hold space for both. "
I don't have an immediate answer for that, so I let the silence sit, turning the information over, trying to fit it into a version of the last three years I understood as simple.
I built a whole narrative around being erased from this place, a narrative I could manage, could grieve cleanly, could use to justify the distance I kept.
This isn't that narrative. This is messier, and it asks something harder of me than grief ever did.
"And Thane," I say eventually, quieter, testing the edge of something I'm not sure I have the right to ask about. "Does he know why nobody sat there? Did he ever say anything about it?"
Something shifts in Gilda's expression, careful, deliberate, like she's weighing how much to tell me and deciding, finally, that I've earned the whole of it.
"He's never looked at anyone the way he used to look at you, Niamh.
Not once, not in three years, not even now, with that girl sitting at our table with a ring he hasn't put on her finger yet despite what the timeline says.
I'm not telling you that to stir anything up.
I'm telling you because you asked a question and you deserve an honest answer, and because I think you've spent three years believing something about your place in this family that was never actually true. "
The words land somewhere unguarded in my chest, and I have to look away from her for a moment, out the small kitchen window at the rain still falling steady over the lot, giving myself a second to absorb something I wasn't braced for.
"I don't know what to do with that," I admit finally.
"You don't have to do anything with it tonight.
" Gilda picks the spoon back up, returning to the pot with the same unhurried rhythm, giving me the gift of letting the conversation settle instead of demanding I resolve it on the spot.
"Go see your dad again if you want. Eat something.
Sleep, if you can manage it. The rest of it will still be here tomorrow.
Some things in this town have a way of waiting for you, whether you're ready for them or not. "
I stay in the kitchen a while longer, helping her plate up dinner for the handful of members still around, grateful for the simple, physical task of it, ladling rice into bowls, the specific comfort of my hands being useful in a way that doesn't require me to think too hard about anything Gilda just told me.
It's well past ten by the time the kitchen empties out and the clubhouse settles into its late night quiet, most everyone gone to their own homes or bunks, and I find myself drawn back to the garage bay instead of my room, the oak table sitting long and empty under the single work lamp still burning at the far end.
I sit down at the corner, in the chair that isn't officially mine and isn't officially anyone else's, and run my hand across the worn wood the way I used to when I was a teenager doing homework here, tracing the same gouges and burns I catalogued the first night I walked back into this room.
The wood is cool under my palm, familiar in a way that aches more than it comforts, three years of absence pressed into every scar in the grain.
I don't know how long I sit there before I hear footsteps, and I don't turn around, some part of me already certain who it is before he speaks.
"Couldn't sleep either?" Thane's voice, quiet, from the doorway behind me.
I don't answer right away, still tracing the same worn groove in the wood, and when I finally do speak, it isn't an answer to his question at all.
"Gilda told me nobody ever sat here because you never gave the order not to. That it wasn't really about waiting for me. It was about grief."
The silence that follows is long enough that I finally do turn to look at him, and whatever I expect to find in his expression, it isn't the raw, unguarded thing actually sitting there, like she's handed him a truth he wasn't ready to have spoken out loud in this room either.
"She's not wrong." His voice is careful, like each word costs him something to release.
"I never gave an order. I couldn't have, even if I'd wanted to.
Every time someone even joked about it, offered to move the chair somewhere more useful, I found some reason to say not yet.
I told myself it was about respect for your dad.
For Everhart. I don't know how much of that was ever entirely true. "
"And the rest of it?" I ask, quieter now, aware of how close we're standing to something neither of us has fully said.
He doesn't answer immediately, crossing the room instead, slow, deliberate, until he's close enough that I have to tilt my head back slightly to keep looking at him, close enough that the space between us feels charged in a way the whole day's carefully maintained distance hasn't quite managed to erase.
"The rest of it isn't a conversation for tonight," he says finally, gentler than I expect.
"You've had enough today. Your dad, Dax, the merger call I still have to actually finish making.
I don't want to hand you something else heavy on top of all of it just because midnight makes people say things they mean but aren't ready to carry yet. "
It's such a careful, deliberately kind thing to say that I don't have an argument ready against it, and some tired, honest part of me is grateful for the reprieve even as another part of me wants to push past it anyway.
"Okay," I say instead, and it comes out softer than I intend.
He studies me a moment longer, like he's memorizing something, then steps back, putting the careful distance between us again, the same distance he's kept since the doorway yesterday, deliberate and a little painful in how consistently he maintains it.
"Get some rest, Niamh." He says it the way he said it last night, and I recognize the ritual of it now, the small, repeated kindness of a man who doesn't know how to say the bigger things yet but knows exactly how to say this one.
He leaves the way he came, footsteps receding down the hallway, and I sit alone at the table a while longer after he's gone, hand still resting against the worn grain of the wood where my chair used to be, where it apparently still is, in every way that matters except the one where I've actually let myself claim it back.
I don't have an answer yet for what to do with any of it, the chair, the grief that kept it empty, the man who just walked away from me twice in twenty four hours out of something that looked a great deal like restraint instead of indifference.
I just sit there in the quiet, listening to the rain start up again against the metal roof, until the cold finally drives me back to my borrowed room and whatever sleep I can manage to find.