Chapter Twenty-Two
MILLIE
The Next Morning
The room is too warm.
Hospital warm.
The kind that makes the air feel used, as though it has already passed through too many lungs before it reaches mine. I shift in the chair, and the vinyl drags faintly against my skin, the sound small but unbearable in the quiet.
I don’t remember sitting down.
I don’t remember deciding to stay.
I only remember the moment they stopped moving around him and the space filled with machines instead of people.
There’s a plastic cup of water on the tray beside the bed. Someone must have left it for me hours ago, but I haven’t touched it. My throat is dry enough to hurt, but the idea of swallowing anything feels… off.
The monitor makes a soft sound.
Not alarming.
Not urgent.
Just there.
I’ve learned its rhythm in the way someone’s breathing becomes familiar when you love them, my body noticing every deviation before my mind can catch up.
Dad’s chest rises.
I hold my own breath without meaning to.
It falls again, and something inside me loosens just enough that I can inhale.
I don’t know when I started doing that.
Somewhere between the ambulance doors closing and the first gray light of morning pressing through the blinds, my brain made a rule—watch him breathe, and he will keep breathing.
His hand rests palm-up on the sheet, fingers slightly curled. I stare at that hand until the lines of it feel carved into me. The hand that taught me to tie knots, to check machinery, and to stand still when everything in me wanted to run.
He looks smaller in this bed.
Not physically smaller.
Just… contained.
As though the world has reduced him to what fits between rails, tubes, and soft, indifferent light. I lean forward and press my forehead against the back of my clasped hands. The smell of antiseptic clings to everything, even him, and it feels so foreign on him.
“I’m here,” I whisper, though I don’t know if he can hear me. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else.
He breathes.
The sound moves through the room like a form of permission. Like a fragile agreement we haven’t discussed, but both understand.
I think about all the mornings he woke before me.
All the nights I assumed he would simply… keep existing.
The way you assume mountains will still be there when you turn your back.
Another breath.
My chest tightens so sharply I have to swallow it down.
“I’m not ready,” I say softly, because honesty feels safer when it’s spoken to someone who cannot answer. “I know you are. But I’m not.”
He breathes again.
So, I stay.
Because as long as he does that, I can pretend the rest of the world is still waiting its turn.
The light through the window has changed from the bruised purple of midnight to the thin, pale gray of early morning.
Las Vegas doesn’t do quiet nights, not really.
Somewhere below us, the city is already in motion, already loud, relentless, and completely indifferent to the fact that my entire world is currently contained in this room.
But up here, on this floor, in this stretch of corridor, bleached light and hushed, purposeful movement, it feels removed from all of that.
I’m reaching for the water cup on the bedside table when my father opens his eyes.
It isn’t gradual. He doesn’t surface the way you’d expect after the night he had, slow and disoriented and blinking at the ceiling. His eyes simply open, and when he looks directly at me, they are completely clear.
My hand stills on the cup.
He looks at me for a long moment, the way he has looked at me my entire life, like I’m something worth taking his time over.
Then, he says my name. “Millie.”
My throat closes, and I set the cup down because I don’t trust my hands with it. “Daddy.” It comes out raspy.
He holds my gaze. His voice is rough from the oxygen mask they had on him through the night, but there’s nothing uncertain in it. Nothing vague. “I heard you.”
I press my lips together and try very hard to find an appropriate response to that, something measured and sensible, something that doesn’t immediately reveal the full scope of what is currently happening to my composure.
I find nothing. My voice, when it comes, is barely above a whisper. “W-what do you mean?”
His hand moves on the blanket, a deliberate, effortful motion, reaching toward mine. I meet him halfway. His fingers close around my hand, dry, warm, and achingly familiar. “What you said about Will. I heard all of it.”
The room tilts slightly.
“All of it?” I repeat, because saying it back gives me something to do while I absorb what he’s said.
Dad doesn’t say anything immediately. He’s always known when to give me room to land, since I was small enough to fit in the crook of his arm. He watches me work through it with that unhurried patience of his, his hand steady around mine, his breathing regular against the pillow.
Then he draws a slow breath and starts to speak, “I’ve been so wrong,” he says, and I make a reflexive sound of protest because he is in a hospital bed and I am not having this conversation. Not today. Not like this.
He squeezes my hand, firm enough to stop me.
“Not about Will.” He pauses to let that land.
“I was never wrong about Will. That boy is exactly the kind of man I would have chosen for you, if choosing were ever something a father got to do.” His voice is tired, but his eyes are very steady.
“I was wrong about letting my own pride get between the two of you. My fear of losing whatever grip I thought I had on your future. Telling myself it was complicated because the mine arrangement made it complicated, because the timing wasn’t right, because there was always some reason to wait. ”
He lets out a slow exhale. “There wasn’t a reason. I was protecting something that didn’t need protecting.”
I hold his hand very tightly.
I don’t think I’m breathing.
Am I breathing?
“Dad—”
“I’ve spent two years watching that boy look at you.
” He continues, and there’s something almost rueful in his voice, like he’s looking back at his own behavior and not liking what he sees, “And watching you look back at him when you thought no one was paying attention. From my armchair. From the kitchen table. From the porch. I’ve watched it every day you brought him into my house, and I told myself it was complicated.
” His mouth curves, just barely. “It isn’t complicated.
He’s good. You love him. Those are the only things that matter. ”
The sound that comes out of me is not dignified.
It is the sound of someone who held everything together through a frustratingly long night and is now faced with the one thing they couldn’t prepare for.
I press my free hand over my mouth and breathe through it, one deliberate breath after another, willing myself to hold on just a little longer.
“Dad…” I manage. “You’re the only thing that matters right now. You’re sitting in a hospital bed, and you are the only thing I care about.”
He shakes his head, slow and certain. “No,” he says.
“He is. He has been for two years. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I’m not going to lie in this bed and pretend otherwise.
” He looks at me with an expression that is entirely clear of ambiguity.
“Go get him, Millie. You have my blessing…” He pauses.
“You’ve always had my blessing. I was just too proud to say it until I had to. ”
I lean forward and press my forehead against his hand and stay there for a long moment while the machines beep steadily around us, the hospital morning continues on its way without us, and the tightness in my chest does something complicated that isn’t quite grief and isn’t quite relief and is mostly just love—the enormous, exhausting, unconditional weight of it.
“I love you,” I say into the blanket.
“I know,” he says, patting my hand the way he has been patting my hand since I was four years old. “I love you too. Now stop crying on my hospital blanket.”
I pull back and find him looking at me with the dry, gentle humor that is his most fundamental mode of expression, the one that has carried us through nineteen years of hard things, and I laugh despite myself, a short, fractured sound that turns into something else and then back again.
“You’re impossible,” I tell him.
“Stubbornness,” he says. “You got it from me.”
He closes his eyes, the exertion of the conversation settling over him.
His grip on my hand loosens, but doesn’t release.
I sit with him until his breathing deepens and evens out into real sleep, proper sleep, the unguarded kind, and I sit for a little while longer.
Then I stand up, gently squeeze his hand, and move out into the corridor, seeing Deek asleep on a plastic chair.
I smile as I walk past, without waking him.
I can’t believe he stayed.
The hallway is long, and I walk to the far end of it, away from the nurses’ station, where there’s a window that looks out over the hospital parking lot and, beyond it, a slice of city skyline going gold at the edges.
I press my shoulder against the glass and dial Sin, who picks up on the second ring.
“Millie.” His voice is alert, already reading me.
“He’s awake,” I say. “He’s stable. He’s talking…” I pause to let that settle before he has to ask. “He’s gonna be okay.”
The silence on his end is brief, but it carries something I don’t have a name for, like he’s setting down the weight of last night. “Good,” he says. “That’s good, Millie.”
“Ghost has what he needs?” I ask because I need to know and because asking keeps my hands from shaking.