The room goes very quiet.
Reilan looks at me. His face is still controlled. His eyes are the same eyes that looked at me across every difficult moment of my life, that sat outside my bedroom door for two weeks after our mother died, that found me at the hospital the night Dad was shot and didn't say a word, just stood beside me and waited.
He says nothing.
That's when I know I'm not going to get what I came for. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.
I open the door.
"Aoife."
I stop. My hand on the frame. I don't turn around.
"I didn't tell them."
He says it one last time. Into the back of my head. Like if he says it enough times, it becomes true, or like he needs me to carry it out of the room with me, one more layer of cover he can point to later.
I leave without answering.
The door clicks shut behind me.
I stand in the dark hallway, and I press my back to the wall, and I breathe. I count the seconds the way I always do when the ground is moving under me. I get to eight before I can trust myself to move.
He didn't argue when I said I wouldn't protect him.
That's the part that won't leave. Not the denial, not the slap, not the controlled face he kept through all of it. He let me walk out of that room without arguing. Without reaching for me the way he always reaches for me when something is wrong. He just said it one more time and let me go.
Because arguing would have meant admitting there was something to argue about.
I knew when I walked in. I have known since the dining room, since I watched William read the room and tell me what he'd seen, and I felt the cold certainty settle in my chest that I've been refusing to look at directly. I knew, and I went to Reilan anyway because I needed him to give me something to hold onto.
He couldn't.
I push off the wall. The hallway is dark and quiet, and the light under Reilan's door is still on. I don't look back at it.
Two days.
Two days of the house operating around the thing none of us are saying. William doesn't ask me anything, which is either patience or strategy.I haven't decided which. Reilan moves through meals and corridors with a careful quietness, like a man who's made a decision and is waiting to see what it costs. I watch him from across the breakfast table on the second morning and try to find the brother who sat in a hospital corridor the night Dad was shot, the one who didn't leave, didn't sleep, didn't speak much—just stayed.
He's still in there. I'm sure of it.
It doesn't change anything. That might be the hardest thing I've learned this week.
The call comes at eleven.
I'm on the edge of the bed with my laptop when the connection goes through, and when my father's face fills the screen, I lose whatever composure I thought I had.
He looks thin. There's a bandage at the edge of his collarbone, barely visible above the hospital gown, and he's lost weight in a way that shows in his face. But his eyes are clear. The same pale blue they've always been, the same shade I see in my own mirror, and when he looks at me, he says, “There she is,” in a voice I haven't heard in weeks, and my chest just cracks open.
"Dad." My voice is not steady. I've stopped trying. "I thought—when they said you were—"
"I'm here." He leans forward slightly, like he wants to close the distance. "I'm right here, Aoife. Not going anywhere."
I press my hand to my mouth and breathe through it.
We talk. It takes a few minutes for the shock of seeing him to settle into something I can actually work with, and he doesn't rush me, just lets me look at him the way I need to.
"You look terrible," he says eventually.
