Chapter Four #2
“Sit down.” She sits because she knows that voice. She has known that voice since we were thirteen years old, sharing a locker at school, and she has learned over those years that when I use it, something worth hearing has either happened or is about to be explained in significant detail.
She shrugs her coat the rest of the way off her shoulders, folds it over the back of the chair, then looks at me with that calm, waiting focus she’s had since we were teens. “Okay,” she says. “Talk.”
“It was the sensors,” I start, already talking too fast. “At the east fence. I thought it was foxes or wind or something stupid, but it wasn’t stupid, it was two men, Penny. Two actual men just… walking, like they owned the place. Like they were measuring it.”
She opens her mouth, but I keep going. “I hid. I didn’t even think about it, I just hid behind Dad’s desk.
I could hear my pulse. Like actually hear it.
And I called Sin, and my voice sounded—” I make a face, and shake my head.
“Not like mine. Like someone who’s already accepted something bad is about to happen. ”
“Mill—”
“And then I had to wait. Eight minutes. Do you know how long eight minutes is when you’re convinced you’re about to be found? It’s not eight minutes. It’s… geological time. I swear I aged.”
Penny sighs, stands, and reaches for the kettle.
I begin to pace. “And then the door opened, and I thought… fuck! I don’t even know what I thought.
But it was Will. Just standing there like he’d always been there.
Like he was part of the b-building.” My voice falters.
“He just… l-looked at me. He found me immediately. As if he knew exactly where I’d be. ”
Penny sets a mug down in front of me.
But I don’t sit, I continue pacing. “He came straight over, didn’t hesitate.
He just dropped to the floor next to me and said, ‘You okay?’ As though that was the only question that mattered in the entire world.
” I swallow. “And I wasn’t. I mean, I was, technically.
But also not.” Penny watches me, her eyebrows slightly raised.
“And then he took my hand,” I say, that part comes out quieter.
“He didn’t even think about it. He just did it.
Like it was the most natural thing in the world. ”
Penny finally speaks, “Take a breath.”
I inhale like I’ve just remembered how.
“He held it out…” I say, my voice relaxing “… and he just... waited. He didn’t make it a thing. He just offered his hand and let me decide.”
Penny is very still across the table from me.
“And I took it,” I continue, because there’s no version of this story where I don’t say that part. “And when I was standing, when we were both standing in the dark with the engines from the bikes running outside, I didn’t let go. Not immediately.”
“How long?” Penny asks, and there is absolutely nothing careless about the way she asks it.
“Three seconds, maybe… four.” I pick up the mug, pace for a few steps, and then set it back down on the table with a small, deliberate click, dropping back down into my seat. “Long enough that it wasn’t about standing up anymore.”
Penny looks at me for a long moment. “Millie,” she says.
“I know.”
“You are in sooo much trouble.”
“I know!” I say, my voice wavering unexpectedly. It’s only now, sitting in my father’s kitchen on a Sunday morning with the paper turning in the next room, that I realize those two words carry more than I’ve let myself feel. “I really do know, Penny.”
She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, the way she’s been doing since we were teenagers, and we sit here in the silence of two people who have been telling each other hard truths long enough to know when one doesn’t need any commentary added to it.
“He’s a good man,” she says eventually.
“He is.”
“And what does your dad think?” She glances toward the living room.
“He told me Will was good to have around. In that specific, very deliberate Jonas McClane way where he’s not saying anything at all and saying everything simultaneously.”
Penny presses her lips together, clearly fighting a smile and losing. “Your dad has excellent taste.”
“My dad also has a meeting with his lawyer this week,” I say, because the thought surfaces the way it always does now, without invitation, from the place where I keep the things I can’t look at directly for too long. “To update some documents.”
“Does he say what kind?”
“No.” I finally take a seat and wrap my hand back around my mug. “And I didn’t ask.”
Penny knows me well enough not to push on that.
She refills her own coffee from the pot on the counter and returns to her chair.
We move on, the way we always do, onto easier things.
Her flower shop, the winter orchid arrangement she’s been trying to source for a client, and a movie I saw midweek that she would like to give her opinion on, whether it’s possible to have an opinion on something you haven’t seen.
“You absolutely can,” she insists. “You’ll have my opinion. Which I will give you in sufficient detail, and that’s functionally the same thing.”
“That’s not how opinions work.”
“It’s exactly how opinions work, Millie.”
Dad reappears from his armchair for a second cup of coffee and joins us at the kitchen table for twenty minutes of conversation that he clearly enjoys even as he pretends it is simply an incidental consequence of being in the same room.
Penny has always been able to make Dad laugh, a skill most people don’t have and one I suspect she’s proud of.
He disappears back to his chair before twelve, with the contentment that comes from good company and good coffee, no words needed.
Eventually, I walk Penny to the door. She pulls on her coat while standing in the doorway, the cold February air curling in around her, and glances back at me before she goes.
“For what it’s worth…” she says. “The four seconds? They counted.” She squeezes my arm once, then she’s down the porch steps, into her car, and I close the door, standing in the hall for a moment with the quiet settling back in around me.
In the living room, Dad’s armchair creaks softly—the paper shifts, followed by the low, steady turn of a page.
I go back to the kitchen and pick up my cell phone from the counter. There are no new messages. The screen is exactly what it was when I set it down an hour ago.
Will is at the clubhouse. He has club things to do, three weeks until the biggest moment of the last two years of his life, and he is absolutely not thinking about the four seconds in the dark of my father’s office.
I set the phone face down on the counter.
The Manila folder from the mine is in my bag, hanging on the hook beside the kitchen door.
My father’s documents, and the reason I was at the mine property in the first place on Friday night, the reason any of this happened.
Even though I haven’t opened them, there’s something in me that feels the folder’s weight from across the room, a low, insistent pull that I’ve been choosing not to acknowledge.
I’ll open them tomorrow.
I think it. Then I think it again.
I’ll open them tomorrow.
As I have for two days, and I know, in the part of myself that doesn’t tolerate bullshit, that tomorrow is going to stretch further than I intend.
I spin around for more coffee, I listen to my father turn another page, and I rest my fingertips against the cold screen of my phone.
Three weeks.
I can wait three weeks.
I’m almost certain I believe that.