CHAPTER SEVEN
Eldin is stable enough by early afternoon that the cardiologist clears him to move down to a step down unit, a smaller, quieter room with fewer machines and considerably more color in his face than yesterday, and I spend two hours sitting with him going over his new medication schedule with the specific, obsessive thoroughness of a daughter who has decided that competence is the only love language she trusts herself with right now.
"You're going to fuss over those pills the way you used to fuss over the med kit inventory," he says, not unkindly, watching me organize his prescriptions into a labeled pillbox I bought at the hospital gift shop because apparently that's a thing they sell now. "Some things really don't change."
"Some things shouldn't." I click the last compartment shut and set it on his tray table, satisfied in the small, contained way that comes from solving a problem with a clear right answer. "You're taking these on schedule, Dad. No skipping doses because you feel fine one day."
"Yes ma'am." A faint smile, tired but real. "Go eat something that isn't hospital cafeteria food. You look like you're running on fumes."
I don't argue, mostly because he's right, and because Thane appears in the doorway not two minutes later with an expression that says he had the exact same thought, offering to drive me somewhere I can actually eat without the low hum of a hospital in the background.
I say yes before I've fully decided whether that's wise.
He takes me to the diner on Fourth Street, the one that's stayed open forty years, unchanged in every particular I remember, the same cracked red vinyl booths, the same bell over the door that's slightly out of tune, the same waitress, older now but unmistakably the same woman, who takes one look at me and says, "Well, if it isn't Eldin Hargrove's girl," like three years is a rounding error in a town this small.
We slide into a booth near the back, and for a moment neither of us says anything, both of us studying laminated menus we clearly don't need, buying time before whatever this conversation is supposed to become.
The diner smells exactly like it always has, coffee and bacon grease and the specific sweetness of pie cooling on the counter, and outside the window the rain has settled into the steady, unhurried kind that seems to define this town more than sunshine ever did.
"Same order?" the waitress asks, pen already poised, not really a question.
"You remember?" I ask, surprised despite myself.
"Honey, I've been serving your father's coffee black with two sugars since before you were born.
Course I remember what his girl orders." She doesn't wait for confirmation, just scribbles it down and moves off toward the kitchen, and something in the easy certainty of it settles a small, unexpected piece of the unease I've been carrying since I crossed the county line yesterday.
"How is he, really?" Thane asks, once the coffee's arrived and the waitress has retreated to give us space. "You've been running numbers at me since yesterday. I want the version you'd give a friend, not a doctor."
"Scared." The word surprises me even as I say it, more honest than I planned. "He's putting on a brave face because that's what he does, but he's scared, and I think some of it is about the heart attack and some of it is about everything else he hasn't said yet."
"Everything else." Thane's voice is careful, testing the edge of something neither of us has named directly since I got back.
"You know what I mean." I wrap both hands around my coffee cup, grounding myself in the warmth of it. "Three years of silence doesn't just evaporate because his heart decided to remind him he's mortal. There's a lot sitting underneath that neither of us has said out loud yet."
He doesn't answer right away, and for a moment we just sit with the ordinary sounds of the diner around us, the waitress's low laugh from the counter, the specific clatter of a busboy stacking plates, the rain finding its rhythm against the glass.
It's strange how a place can hold you steady even when the conversation inside it isn't steady at all.
Thane is quiet for a moment, turning his own cup slowly on the table, and when he speaks again his voice has dropped into something more private, meant only for this booth, this hour, the two of us.
"I think about that night more than you'd probably guess," he says.
"Not the way people think I do. Not guilt exactly, though there's plenty of that too.
Just. I think about how fast everything can change in forty minutes.
How you can be somewhere you've never been happier, and forty minutes later the whole world's different, and you can't ever get back to the version of yourself that existed before it happened. "
My chest goes tight, the specific ache of hearing someone else name the exact shape of a wound I've spent three years believing only I carried. "I think about it every day," I admit, quieter than I mean to. "Not just the accident. That whole night. All of it."
Something shifts in his expression, careful and searching, like he's about to ask the question that's been sitting behind his eyes since the doorway of the clubhouse yesterday, and for one suspended second I think we might actually get somewhere honest, somewhere real, the two of us finally saying the thing neither of us has said in three years.
"Niamh." His voice is low, deliberate. "That night, before Gunnar called. I've never."
The bell over the door jangles, and a club member I vaguely recognize, older, weathered, cuts across the diner toward our booth with the particular urgency of someone who's been sent to deliver news rather than someone stopping by to chat.
"Thane, sorry to interrupt." He doesn't sound sorry, exactly, just businesslike, oblivious to whatever he's just walked into the middle of.
"Odric's people called again. They want confirmation on the merger timeline before the end of the week.
Said if we can't commit to a date soon, they're going to start assuming the arrangement's off, and given everything with his health, that's not a message we want them getting the wrong idea about. "
Thane's whole posture changes in an instant, the openness from thirty seconds ago folding itself back into something guarded, professional, the president rather than the man across the booth from me.
"Tell them I'll call by Friday." His voice is flat now, businesslike in a way that feels like a door closing somewhere I was just standing.
The member nods, apologizes again for the interruption, and retreats, leaving the two of us sitting in a silence that's completely different from the one before, colder, more crowded, three other people suddenly present in the booth even though it's still just the two of us.
"Merger timeline," I say, because someone has to say something, and it might as well be me stating the obvious. "For the engagement."
"Niamh."
"You don't owe me an explanation." I say it fast, defensively, before he can offer one I'm not sure I'm ready to hear. "I know what this is. I've known since the doorway yesterday. I'm not asking you to justify it."
"I wasn't going to justify it." His voice is quiet, careful. "I was going to say it's complicated, and that I want to tell you the whole of it properly, when it's not getting interrupted by club business in the middle of a diner."
"Okay." I don't know what else to say, so I focus on my coffee instead, the specific comfort of a task with no emotional weight attached to it.
The waitress returns with our food a few minutes later, setting down plates neither of us fully asked for but both of us apparently still order on instinct, eggs for him, a grilled cheese for me, the exact same meal we used to split half of on nights neither of us had money for two full plates.
Neither of us mentions the coincidence. I don't think either of us has to.
The rest of the meal happens in a strange, careful truce, both of us talking around the edges of things instead of through the middle of them, comparing notes on Dax's arm, on Eldin's recovery timeline, on anything that isn't the merger or the accident or the sentence Thane didn't get to finish.
It's not unpleasant, exactly. It's just smaller than what almost happened, and I can feel the size of that difference the whole time we eat.
The drive back to the clubhouse happens mostly in silence, rain starting up again against the windshield, both of us watching the road instead of each other, the easy opening from the diner booth folded back up and put away somewhere neither of us seems ready to reopen it.
"I meant what I said," Thane offers finally, pulling into the lot, engine idling while neither of us moves to get out. "About wanting to tell you properly. Not today, with everything else going on. But soon."
"Soon," I repeat, and it comes out more skeptical than I mean it to, three years of soon that never actually arrived sitting underneath the single word.
He hears it. I watch him hear it, something flinching briefly behind his eyes before he nods once, accepting the fairness of my doubt without arguing against it, and we sit there another moment in the idling car, rain drumming steady on the roof, both of us aware that whatever almost happened in that diner booth is going to have to wait, again, for a version of soon that either of us can actually trust.
"For what it's worth," he says, hand pausing on the door handle, not quite looking at me, "I'm not the same man who let you leave without saying anything three years ago. I'd like the chance to prove that, eventually. Whenever soon actually gets here."
I don't have an answer for that either, not one I trust myself to say out loud without it turning into more than either of us is ready for, so I just nod, and we get out of the car into the rain, the unfinished sentence from the diner following us both back inside like a third passenger neither of us invited but neither of us has found a way to leave behind.