Chapter Twenty-Nine
MILLIE
One Month Later
The lamp on my father’s bedside table is still on, casting its low amber glow across the room, and I can hear his breathing from the armchair where I’ve been sitting for the last hour.
It has changed. I noticed it the moment I woke, some instinct pulling me up from a light, fitful sleep, and I knew before I was fully conscious that something had shifted.
Will is awake, too. He’s in the chair by the door, and his eyes find mine across the room the moment I lift my head, and the steadiness in his expression tells me he has been listening to it as long as I have.
My father’s chest rises and falls, and the space between those two things is longer than it should be.
I cross to the bed and take Dad’s hand, carefully, the way I have learned to do everything in these past months, with a gentleness that acknowledges how much has changed without making him feel fragile.
His eyes open when I settle beside him, slow and heavy-lidded, and he looks at me the way he has been looking at me lately, with a thoroughness to it, like he is memorizing something.
“Millie girl,” he says, and his voice is low and rough with tiredness.
“I’m here,” I tell him. “I’m right here.”
Will moves from the doorway to the other side of the room without making a sound. He doesn’t come to the bed, he positions himself close enough that I know he’s there, far enough that the space beside my father belongs to me.
I reach for my phone on the nightstand, the instinct sharp and immediate. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
My father’s hand tightens around mine with a firmness that surprises me. “No.”
“Dad.”
“No hospital, Amelia.” His eyes are fully open now, and clear, clearer than they’ve been all week, with that clarity that I am only just beginning to understand the meaning of. “I’ve already been to the hospital enough times. I want to be here. I want to be in my own bed.”
My throat closes over. “But the paramedics could make you more comfortable. They could—”
“Millie.” Will’s voice comes low from just behind me.
I turn, and the look on his face hits me straight in the chest.
It’s the expression he gets when he’s already made up his mind about something hard. Something that’s going to cost him, but he’s doing it anyway because walking away from it was never really an option.
His jaw is set, his eyes are steady, and he holds my gaze for a moment before he speaks, “Let me call the palliative care team to come and make him comfortable here,” he says, careful and measured.
“They can do that. And then he stays home…” He pauses.
“He told me yesterday. This is where he wants to be.”
I stare at him. I know what he is telling me. I know what yesterday was. The hour they spent together alone in the living room, the hour I have not asked about. Whatever my father said to Will in that room, he has been carrying it since, and right now he is handing me the part I need.
My father squeezes my hand again. “Let the boy call them,” he says, a faint, unmistakable note of satisfaction in his voice at being able to refer to Will that way.
The way he has been referring to him for the last month, as the boy, as though Will were something he had chosen himself, which I suppose he had.
I nod because I don’t trust my voice, and Will steps out of the room.
I hear him on the phone in the hallway, calm and precise, giving the address, describing what’s happening with a clarity that tells me he has prepared himself for this, that he knew this was coming and made sure he would know what to do when it did.
The sound of it, his voice through the wall, measured and certain, is the thing that keeps me from coming apart entirely.
I sit on the edge of the bed, and I hold my father’s hand in both of mine, and I look at him. “I’m scared,” I tell him, because I am, and because he has always deserved my honesty more than my composure.
“I know,” he says, and something in his face softens. “You’ve been brave enough for both of us for a long time now. You can put that down.”
My eyes fill. “Daddy, I don’t want you to go.”
“I know that too.” He lifts his free hand, slowly, and puts it over mine.
His hands are large and warm, my father’s hands, the hands that carried me through mine shafts and fixed fences and turned newspaper pages over Sunday breakfast for as long as I can remember.
“But I’ve had everything I wanted. You know that, don’t you?
I’ve had the mine, and the club, and good years with your mother, and then I’ve had you.
And last week…” His mouth moves into an absolutely genuine smile.
“Last month I watched that young man walk out of that Chapel.”
“Don’t,” I say softly, because I am already too full.
“I’m just saying…” he says, with satisfaction, like everything has gone exactly the way he intended, “… that I’m not leaving anything unfinished.”
The knock is soft.
Will opens the door before the knock has even fully stopped echoing through the house, and two palliative care workers step inside, moving fast without making a production out of it.
Their boots barely make a sound on the timber floor, but the equipment they’re carrying sure as hell does.
“Hi, Mr. McClane,” the woman says, crouching beside the bed like she’s greeting him in a café rather than at the edge of his life. “We’re just going to make you a bit more comfortable, okay?”
Dad gives the smallest nod. The kind that costs him.
I don’t move from where I’m sitting. My hand stays wrapped around his, fingers tucked into the familiarity of him, like I can memorize it by touch alone.
The man checks the monitor. The woman adjusts the pillows with a care that feels almost clinical, lifting him fractionally, settling him again as though the bed has become sacred ground.
They speak to him as if he is still entirely himself.
“Any pain?”
He simply blinks like that’s a stupid question.
“Okay. We’ll help with that.”
A syringe clicks, tape tears softly, fabric shifts. Every sound feels amplified and impossibly far away at the same time.
I watch their hands.
I watch them never rush him.
I watch the way they give him dignity in small increments.
When they finish, the woman briefly rests her palm on his forearm.
“You just focus on resting now,” she says gently.
He looks at her, then at me. Then at Will, who has not moved from his position near the door, a silent line of protection that feels as natural as breathing.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Will says, as if he understands the question without needing words.
Dad exhales—it sounds like relief.
He gestures faintly toward the hallway, polite even now, and the palliative care workers understand. They pack up with the same unhurried rhythm they arrived with, the soft zip of equipment cases sounding too loud in the room’s hush.
“Call if you need us,” the man says, and Will walks them out.
The front door closes with a muted click that seems to echo all the way back down the years of this house.
When Will returns, he pauses just inside the room, leaning his shoulder lightly against the wall like he’s securing himself there.
Not stepping into something that belongs to Dad and me alone, but close enough that I feel the steadiness of him like another heartbeat in the space.
The light in the room is warm. Late afternoon spilling through the curtains in soft gold bands that dust the edges of everything, turning the air thick and slow.
It is just the three of us now.
I shift closer on the mattress, the springs sighing under the movement.
Dad’s hand is lighter than it used to be.
The bones are more pronounced beneath my fingers.
I thread mine through his anyway, fitting them together like I’ve done since I was small, and he let me hold on when thunderstorms rolled in.
“Do you remember that bakery on Carson?” I ask, my voice softer than I intend. “The one that used to do the lemon tarts with the ridiculous amount of sugar on top?”
His eyelids flutter. A slow blink. Yes.
“I found a place like that,” I tell him. “On the east side. Big windows, brick walls. It gets this light in the afternoons that makes everything look like it’s already part of a memory.”
His mouth moves. There is no sound, just effort.
“It’s not too far,” I add quickly. “You could come sit at the counter. Pretend you’re inspecting the structural integrity of my display cases.”
The corner of his mouth lifts… barely. It is enough to make my throat close, but I keep talking because stopping feels like giving something up.
“I’m going to call it something simple. Nothing pretentious. Just… good bread. Good coffee. The kind of place you don’t have to dress up for.”
His eyes move to the window, then back to me. There’s a question there, a lifetime of them.
“Yes,” I answer softly. “I’ll be okay.”
Behind me, Will shifts his weight, the faint creak of leather the only reminder he’s there at all. I don’t turn, I don’t need to, because his presence sits in the room like a quiet promise.
Dad squeezes my hand.
It’s weak.
It’s everything.
The machines that the home nurse team set up hum. A clock ticks somewhere down the hall. Floorboards creak now and then beneath the weight of the old house, every sound sharper tonight somehow. The whole place feels heavy with memories and the reality that time is starting to run thinner around us.
I lean my forehead gently against the back of his hand.
And I keep talking.
Dad’s focus drifts. It isn’t sudden, just a slow shift of attention, like something inside him has decided to look elsewhere for a moment. His gaze slides past me and settles on Will.
Will straightens slightly where he stands by the door, as if he feels the weight of it land on him before he fully understands why. He doesn’t move closer or speak. He meets my father’s eyes and holds them.
There is a pause that feels longer than time allows.