"Hey, bug." His eyes moved over my face, reading me the way he read spooked animals. Probably looking for signs of injury, of shock, of something that needed tending. "You okay?"
I nodded, even though I wasn't. We both knew it.
He didn’t push. That was Dad. He'd wait, make room, and when you were ready to talk, he'd be there… same as he'd always been.
He turned back to the stove and flipped the bacon. "Eggs?"
"Sure."
I sat at the kitchen table, the same scarred oak table we'd had my whole life, and watched him cook. The kitchen was small, outdated, the same yellow linoleum that had been here sincethe eighties. Mom had always wanted to renovate. Put in new countertops, maybe a tile backsplash. She'd torn out pictures from magazines, made a whole folder of ideas.
After she died, Dad never touched it. Left everything exactly as it was.
He moved slower than I remembered. His shoulders had gone a little stooped, his beard more white than gray. The skin on his hands looked thinner, papery, mottled with age. When had that happened? When had my father gotten old?
He'd been talking about retiring for years. Winding down the clinic, maybe selling it, finally taking it easy. He'd earned it. Forty years of early mornings and late nights, of births and deaths and everything in between. Decades of being the steady hand in the room when everyone else was falling apart.
The man deserved to rest.
Instead, his daughter had shown up at 3 AM with her marriage in flames.
"Mrs. Patterson's cat got into another fight," Dad said, sliding a plate in front of me. Eggs, bacon, toast with butter. The same breakfast he'd made me every Saturday of my childhood. "Third time this month. I told her that tom's never going to learn, but she won't listen."
"She never does."
"Hendersons had twins. Goats, not kids. Named them Salt and Pepper."
"Creative."
"And there's talk about the diner closing. Marge says she can't find anyone to take it over. Kids don't want it."
"That's a shame."
He sat down across from me with his own plate, and we ate in silence for a while, the easy quiet of two people who didn't need to fill every moment with words. Outside, the sun was comingup over the fields, painting everything gold and pink. A rooster crowed somewhere in the distance.
Millbrook was waking up.
"Don't know what's going on," Dad said finally, not looking at me. He kept his attention on his eggs. "Don't need to know, unless you want to tell me."
I pushed a piece of bacon around my plate.
"But you can stay," he continued. "Long as you like. This is your home, Elena. Always has been, always will be."
I got up and hugged him. He smelled like coffee and bacon grease and Old Spice, the same smell that had meant safety my entire life. His arms came around me the way they had when I was five, when I was twelve, when I was standing on this same kitchen floor the morning after Mom's funeral trying to figure out how to exist in a world without her.
"Thanks, Dad," I whispered.
He just held on tighter.
The cemetery wasquiet this time of morning.
It was just me, the headstones, and the mist rising off the grass like the earth was breathing. The iron gate creaked when I pushed it open—it had creaked for as long as I could remember, would probably creak until it rusted off its hinges—and I walked the familiar path without looking. Past the Hendersons, the Oatleys, the whole row of Millers who'd founded this town back when it was just farms and a church.
I knelt in front of Mom’s grave and brushed a brown leaf off the stone.
Margaret Rose Whitaker.
Beloved wife and mother.
