That startles a laugh out of me. "You're in a hospital bed."
"I've looked worse in better circumstances." The corner of his mouth lifts. Then he goes quieter. "I hear you've been holding things together over there."
"William's been doing most of it."
He looks at me for a moment, the way he used to when I was young and he was working out what I wasn't saying. "Tell me about him."
"He's capable. He knows what he's doing."
"That's not what I'm asking."
I look at my father's face through a laptop screen in a borrowed room in a house where a man was shot four days ago, and I try to find the careful diplomatic version of the answer. The one that gives him the facts without giving him more than he's asked for.
I don't find it.
What I find instead is William at the kitchen range at two in the morning, asking me what I'd seen in Reilan's face. The way he'd listened—not collecting ammunition, just actually listening, like my read of the room was information he needed from someone he trusted to give it straight. The way he'd handed me the three days without making it a debt.
And the night before that, the steadiness of him in the dark, no performance of reassurance, just the plain, unadorned fact of his presence. I have you. Said the way you state logistics. It reached further into me than anything dressed up ever could.
"He's more than I expected," I say.
My father is quiet. Watching me with that expression that means he's already ahead of me.
"You've fallen for him," he says. Soft. Certain.
My throat tightens. I open my mouth to give him the safe version, the measured version, the version I've been giving myself for three days. It doesn't come.
"Aoife."
I look at this man who gave me away like currency. Who made a promise and broke it because circumstances changed, and there was no one left to hold him to it. Who is lying in a hospital bed right now because he chose the right side of a war, and it cost him.
"Yes," I say. Very quietly. "I think I have."
He nods once. His face does something complicated—relief and grief moving through it together, the look of a man who wanted this and knows what it took to get here.
"You have my blessing," he says. "For whatever that means to you now."
More than he knows. I don't say it.
"There's something I have to tell you," I say. "About Reilan."
The shift in him is immediate. He knows my voice well enough to hear what's underneath it before I've said anything. His face stills.
"Tell me."
I tell him. I keep it level. I give him what I know, what I saw, and what Reilan said and didn't say. I watch my father's face go through things I have never seen on it before. Disbelief first, moving fast into something harder, and then underneath that something old and raw and grieved that he can't quite keep from showing.
When I stop, the connection hums.
Dad's hand, the one I can see, has closed into a fist against the blanket. He doesn't speak for a long moment.
"How much does William have?"
"Enough to be dangerous. I don't know exactly what. He's been building it."
Silence.
"Dad." I wait until he looks at me. "I went to him. I asked him directly, and he denied it. He didn't stop denying it." I keep my voice steady. "I don't know what they're holding over him, but whatever it is, he isn't ready to let go of it. Not even for me."
