CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The phone rings at three in the morning, shrill and wrong in the dark, and Thane has it against his ear before I've even fully surfaced from sleep, his body going rigid beside me in a way that yanks me fully awake in the same instant.
"When." His voice is clipped, already reaching for his jeans on the floor with his free hand. "We're on our way."
"What happened." I'm already moving too, pulling on yesterday's clothes with hands that aren't quite steady.
"Your dad. Another event, they're saying his heart rhythm went unstable about twenty minutes ago." He's pulling on his boots without sitting down, both of us racing against a clock neither of us can see. "Hospital wants us there now."
The drive takes eleven minutes that feel like an hour, rain turned to sleet against the windshield, neither of us speaking, both of us braced for whatever's waiting on the other side of the hospital doors.
I run every scenario clinically, ejection fraction, likely arrhythmia, possible interventions, because thinking like a nurse is still the only thing keeping the daughter in me from coming apart completely.
Thane's hand finds mine on the console somewhere around the second mile, wordless, and I hold onto it the entire rest of the drive, grateful, in this one narrow window, that whatever complications wait for us later, right now there's simply another person in the car who loves my father too, who understands exactly what this particular kind of fear feels like without needing it explained.
They've moved him to the cardiac ICU by the time we arrive, and the doctor who meets us in the hallway has the careful, measured expression of someone delivering news that could go either way.
"He's stabilized for now," she says, and the room around me seems to exhale collectively.
"But I won't pretend this wasn't serious.
His heart's been through a lot in a short window.
We're keeping him under close monitoring, and I think it's fair for you to prepare yourself for the possibility that his heart may not fully recover its previous function, even with the best case outcome from here. "
The words land heavy, not the immediate crisis I braced for, but a longer, quieter kind of fear, the sense of watching a door slowly beginning to close even if it hasn't shut yet.
"Can I see him," I ask, and she nods, leading me back while Thane stays behind at the ICU desk, giving me the same privacy he's given me all week, present but not intruding, close enough to be reached the moment I need him.
My father is awake, pale against the white sheets, wires and monitors surrounding him in a way that makes him look smaller than even the first night. He manages a weak smile when he sees me, reaching for my hand before I've even fully crossed the room.
"You keep doing this to me," I say, voice cracking despite every effort to keep it steady. "I'm starting to think you're doing it on purpose to get me to visit more."
"Caught me." His voice is thready but his eyes are clear, present, more alert than I expect given what the doctor just told me. "Niamh. Before anything else happens tonight, I need to finish what I started to tell you in that other room. I don't want to run out of time again."
"Dad, you should rest, you don't have to."
"I do have to." Firm, despite the exhaustion, his grip on my hand tightening.
"You told me the truth about that night.
About Thane. And I told you I already knew, and then that nurse whisked me away before I could explain what I meant, and I have thought about almost dying without finishing that sentence more times in the last few hours than I care to admit. "
I go very still, every instinct sharpening toward whatever he's about to say.
"About a year ago, Thane came to me," he continues, slower now, pacing himself against his own limited strength.
"Sat right where you're sitting now, actually, though it was my kitchen table then, not a hospital bed.
Told me the truth. That you two were together that night, under the bridge, that he was the reason you were late, that he'd carried the guilt of it alone for two years by then and couldn't do it anymore without at least telling me. "
The room tilts slightly, my understanding of the last three years reorganizing itself in real time. "He told you. A year ago. And you never said anything to me."
"What was I supposed to say, Niamh? You'd already been gone two years by then.
I didn't have a way to reach you that didn't feel like intruding on whatever peace you'd built for yourself out there.
" His voice softens, apologetic in a way I've rarely heard from him.
"I forgave you both a long time ago, for what it's worth.
Nobody could have known that road would be wet enough, that truck driver careless enough.
Everhart wouldn't have wanted either of you carrying this the way you have. "
"You forgave us." My voice comes out hollow, disbelieving. "A year ago. And Thane knew you knew, this whole time, and he never told me."
"That part I can't answer for him." Gently, watching my face with the particular care of someone who can see a storm building and doesn't have the strength left to stop it. "That's a conversation between the two of you, not me."
He drifts toward sleep almost immediately after, the effort of the conversation finally catching up with him, and I sit there for a long moment, still holding his hand, feeling something complicated and furious crystallizing in my chest, underneath the relief of his forgiveness, a sharper, colder realization taking root.
Thane knew. For a year, Thane has known that my father already understood the truth, already forgiven us both, and he let me carry that guilt alone anyway, let me believe I was the only one protecting a secret that apparently stopped being a secret to the one person who mattered most a full year ago.
I ease my hand out of my father's grip once his breathing settles fully into sleep, and I walk out into the hallway where Thane is waiting, leaning against the wall in the same spot he occupied outside the last hospital room I sat in, and something in my expression must announce itself before I've said a single word, because I watch him straighten, watch his face shift from relief that my father's stable into something more wary.
"Niamh. What's wrong?"
"You told my father." My voice comes out low, controlled in the specific, dangerous way I know from experience means I'm holding something back with everything I have.
"A year ago. You sat at his kitchen table and told him everything, and he forgave us, and you never once thought that was information I might want to have. "
Understanding dawns across his face in real time, followed almost immediately by something that looks like dread.
"Niamh, let me explain."
"I've been carrying this alone for three years, Thane.
" My voice cracks despite my best effort to keep it level, three years of careful control finally splitting open in a hospital hallway at three in the morning.
"I just told my dying father a truth I've never said out loud to another living soul, and it turns out I was the last person in this whole story who didn't already know how it ends. "