CHAPTER TWELVE
Three days pass in a rhythm I don't examine too closely, mornings at the hospital watching my father's color improve, afternoons folded into small, useful tasks around the clubhouse that nobody asks me to do and nobody stops me from doing either, restocking the med kit properly, updating contact sheets that haven't been touched since I left, small competent acts that let me avoid thinking too hard about a gravel lot conversation I still haven't found a way to put down.
Thane and I orbit each other carefully during those three days, coffee some mornings, a few charged, unfinished conversations that neither of us pushes past the surface, both of us apparently agreeing without discussing it that whatever got said in the cold needs time before either of us tries to build anything on top of it.
It's Gunnar who breaks the rhythm, finding me in the garage bay on the fourth morning with an expression I've learned to read as trouble before he's said a single word.
"Thane in his office?" I ask, already sensing this isn't a casual visit.
"Should be. You should probably be there too, actually." Gunnar's jaw is tight, a tension I haven't seen on him since the night he called me about Everhart, and something cold settles low in my stomach at the memory the expression drags up unbidden.
I follow him to the small back office, converted from what used to be a storage closet, Thane already behind the desk with his phone pressed to his ear, expression darkening with every passing second of whatever he's hearing.
He glances up when we enter, holds up one finger, and finishes the call with a clipped, "Understood.
I'll be in touch by end of day," before setting the phone down with more force than it probably deserves.
"Odric had another episode this morning," he says, before either of us can ask.
"Smaller than the first stroke, but the doctors are calling it a warning that a bigger one's likely coming.
His people are panicking, and panic in that charter means people start looking for someone to blame for the instability, which means. "
"Which means the merger," I finish, the cold in my stomach spreading.
"Which means the merger." Thane rubs a hand over his face, exhaustion written into every line of him in a way I haven't seen since the night his best friend died.
"They're pushing to make the engagement official and binding within the month.
Public announcement, formal ceremony planning, the whole thing.
Odric's people want proof of stability locked in before he's too compromised to see it happen, and I don't blame them for wanting that, given what's at stake for their charter. "
The room goes very quiet, Gunnar shifting uncomfortably by the door, clearly wishing he were anywhere else for this particular conversation.
"Within a month." I hear my own voice from somewhere slightly outside myself, flat, careful, the same register I use delivering bad news to a family in a waiting room. "That's."
"Fast. I know." Thane looks at me directly, none of the careful distance from the last few days managing to hold under the weight of what he's just had to tell me.
"I need to talk to Ravinia properly, in person, and that conversation deserves privacy I can't give it standing in this office with a phone that's already ringing again about logistics.
I wanted you to hear it from me before you heard it secondhand from anyone else in this building. "
I nod, because I don't trust my voice with anything more complicated right now, and Gunnar, reading the room correctly, excuses himself with a murmured something about handling the supply schedule, leaving Thane and me alone in the small office with a month suddenly sitting between us like a countdown neither of us asked for.
"I'm not going to let this happen the way they're planning it," Thane says, quieter now, more for me than for the room.
"I need you to know that. But I also can't just detonate a peace treaty overnight without a plan, not when Odric's charter is genuinely fragile and genuinely needs something solid to hold onto.
People's lives are actually riding on how carefully I handle the next few weeks, not just mine. "
"I know." I do know, and the knowing doesn't make it easier, some old, familiar instinct already reasserting itself in my chest, the specific, practiced habit of stepping back from something that hurts before it can hurt worse.
"You should do what's right for the charter, Thane.
I'm not asking you to blow anything up for me. "
"That's not what I said." Something sharper in his voice now, frustration bleeding through the careful calm.
"I said I'm not letting it happen the way they're planning it.
There's a difference, Niamh, and I need you to actually hear it, not just brace for the version of this you've already decided is coming. "
I don't answer that, because he's right, and because I can already feel myself doing exactly what he's describing, the old pattern reasserting itself with a speed that frightens me. Protect first. Retreat before the loss becomes real. Manage the wound before anyone else even sees it forming.
"I need to go check on my dad," I say instead, which is true, and also the easiest available exit from a conversation I'm not equipped to have honestly right now.
Thane studies me for a long moment, something resigned in his expression, like he recognizes exactly what I'm doing even as I do it. "Okay," he says finally. "Go. I'll call you when I know more."
I don't correct him, don't tell him he doesn't have my new number, that he's speaking as though a habit of communication already exists between us that we haven't actually rebuilt yet, and something in the assumption lands softer than it probably should, given everything else sitting in the room.
I spend the rest of that day and the next two almost entirely at the hospital, extending my father's discharge planning into a project far more thorough than it strictly needs to be, cross referencing medication interactions, calling his cardiologist's office twice with questions I already know the answers to, filling every available hour with tasks that keep my hands busy and my mind fractionally quieter than it would be otherwise.
My father notices before I'm willing to admit it myself. "You've made that pillbox alphabetical," he says on the second afternoon, watching me reorganize his prescriptions for the third time that day. "I don't think that's for my benefit, Niamh."
"It's more efficient this way."
"Sure it is." He doesn't push it further, just watches me with the same patient, assessing look he gave me the day he asked for the truth I still haven't fully told him, and I busy myself with the pill organizer instead of meeting his eyes, aware of exactly how transparent I probably am to a man who's spent thirty years reading rooms for a living.
I don't go back to the clubhouse. I tell myself it's because my father needs me at the hospital, which is true enough to survive scrutiny, and I don't examine too closely the fact that I've started sleeping in the uncomfortable vinyl recliner in his hospital room instead of driving the fifteen minutes back to the small borrowed room where Thane's voice, low and unfinished, still seems to live in the walls.
By the third night, my father sleeping soundly beside me, monitor beeping its steady, reassuring rhythm, I sit alone in the recliner with my phone in my hand, three unread texts from Tabby I haven't answered, one missed call from a number I don't recognize that's probably the clubhouse landline, and I finally let myself admit, in the particular honesty that only exhaustion seems to unlock in me, that I've spent the last two days doing the exact thing my father asked me not to do anymore.
I open Tabby's messages, finally, guilt catching up with me faster than I expect.
You okay? reads the first, sent two days ago.
Then, You've gone quiet, which is never a good sign with you.
Then, simplest and most direct of all, just checking you're not disappearing on me the way you disappear on everyone else.
I don't answer any of them properly, just send back a short, I'm okay, complicated week, will call soon, promise, which is true in the way that most of my reassurances to Tabby have been true for the last three years, technically accurate and carefully incomplete.
Running. Just slower this time, and better disguised, hiding inside competence instead of a car heading out of town, but running all the same.
The hospital room is dim except for the monitor's glow and the hallway light bleeding in under the door, and I sit there a long time in the quiet, turning my phone over in my hands, not calling anyone, not texting anyone back, just sitting with the specific, familiar ache of having built distance again the second something started to feel too real to survive losing.