I studied her face, looking for signs of strain or fear or that careful mask she wore when she was pretending to be fine. I didn't find any of it. What I found instead was something softer. Something that looked almost like ... contentment.
"You like being here," I said, surprised by how much relief that brought me.
Her mouth curved. "I think I do. Is that weird?"
"No." I kissed her forehead, then her nose, then her mouth—soft and brief and full of things I didn't have words for yet. "It's perfect."
She smiled against my lips. "Go talk to your dad. I'll be here when you're done."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
I kissed her once more, then forced myself to let go and turn away before I changed my mind and stayed.
My father was waiting in the hall outside the war room, hands in his pockets, shoulders against the wall. He looked up when I approached, and something flickered across his face—hope, maybe, or fear. Both.
"Walk with me?" he asked.
I nodded.
We moved through the halls of Dominion Hall in silence, past closed doors and empty offices, until we found ourselves outside on a wide veranda that overlooked the harbor. The night air was cool and damp, heavy with salt. Below us, water lapped against pilings, a steady rhythm that felt older than any of this.
My father stopped at the railing, hands gripping the wood, gaze fixed on the dark water. I stood beside him, close enough to touch but not touching, and waited.
"I kept tabs," he said finally. "On all of you. Every one of my sons. Montana and Charleston both."
The words landed like stones.
"I know that doesn't make it better," he continued. "Watching from a distance isn't the same as being there. But I need you to know—I never stopped being your father. Even when I couldn't be in the same room. Even when I had to stay dead."
My hands curled into fists on the railing. "Why?"
"Why did I keep tabs? Or why did I leave?"
"Both." The word came out rougher than I'd meant it to. "All of it. Why you left. Why you stayed gone. Why you let us think you were dead for fifteen years." My voice cracked. "Why you let me become nothing."
He turned to look at me then, and the pain in his eyes was so raw it nearly knocked me back a step. "You were never nothing, Gideon."
"I felt like nothing." The confession ripped out of me, jagged and bleeding. "You were everything to me. You taught me to track, to hunt, to read the weather and the land and the spaces between what people said and what they meant. You made me feel like I could do anything. Be anything. And then one day you were just ... gone. No explanation. No body. Just gone."
My throat was burning now, eyes hot. I didn't try to stop it.
"I was twelve," I said. "Twelve years old, and the only thing that made sense in my world disappeared. And I spent the next fifteen years trying to figure out what I'd done wrong. What I'd failed at. Why I wasn't enough to make you stay."
"Gideon—"
"No." I shook my head, hands shaking on the railing. "You don't get to tell me I wasn't nothing when that's exactly what I felt like. Every single day. I turned into a ghost because you became one first. I learned to disappear because you taught me that people you love just ... vanish."
The silence that followed was crushing.
My father's hands were white-knuckled on the railing beside mine. His jaw worked like he was trying to find words and failing.
"You're right," he said finally, voice hoarse. "You're absolutely right. I did that to you. To all of you. And there's no apology big enough to fix it."
"Then why?" I demanded, turning to face him fully. "Why leave? And don't tell me it was to protect us. Don't give me sometactical bullshit about The Vanguard or Department 77 or any of it. I need to know why you chose to disappear instead of fight. Why you chose to let your sons grow up thinking they'd lost you."
He closed his eyes. Took a long, shaking breath. When he opened them again, they were wet.
