Daniel waited, the way he always did, without filling the silence.
“He’s worried about me being alone,” I said carefully. “After. He made me promise to—He wants me to be—” I stopped again. This was not the hallway. This was not the moment. There was too much of it and I hadn’t sorted any of it yet. “He just wants me to be okay.”
Daniel looked at me for a long moment. “Are you?”
Not even a little bit, I didn’t say. “I’m working on it.”
He nodded once and pushed off the wall and put his arm around my shoulders, and I let myself lean into it, just slightly, just enough.
We walked back toward the elevator like that, and I thought about what Grandpa had said, and I thought about Daniel’s arm solid and certain across my shoulders, and I thought about how thoroughly and completely I was not ready to sort out what any of it meant.
One thing at a time.
FOUR
DANIEL
I woke up on Ellie’s couch at half-past six to the particular quality of silence that meant someone else in the house was already awake and had been for a while. It was the kind of silence that had weight to it. Occupied silence. Thinking silence.
The couch was not designed for a man of my size. It was one of those narrow, decorative things that looked comfortable enough to sit on but had clearly never been intended for sleeping, and certainly not for sleeping six-foot-two of firefighter. I had a crick in my neck that was going to make itself known for the next two days, and my left foot had gone completely to sleep somewhere around four in the morning, but I’d been too tired and too unwilling to move to do anything about it. I lay there for a moment, staring up at the ceiling with its faint water stain in the corner that had been there since the winter before last, listening to the stillness of the house settle around me. The faint ticking of a kettle past the boil told me Ellie was already up.
I sat up, ran both hands over my face, and went to find her.
She was at the kitchen table.
She was still in most of the clothes she’d been wearing yesterday, though she’d traded the work trousers for whatever she’d found first in the dark, which appeared to be an old pair of flannel sleep pants covered in small yellow ducks that I had seen many times before and had historically taken great pleasure in giving her grief about. Her hair was down and slightly wrecked from what little sleep she’d managed, pulled free of whatever she’d tied it back with and falling around her face in a way she hadn’t bothered to fix. She had both hands wrapped around a mug like it was the only warm thing left in the world, and she was staring at the middle distance with the focused, hollow look of someone who had been sitting in exactly that position, with exactly that one thought, for a long time.
The mug had stopped steaming.
“How long have you been up?” I asked.
She blinked slowly and brought her eyes to me, like she was returning from somewhere far off. “A while.”
“Did you sleep at all?”
A pause. The kind of pause that told me everything I needed to know. “Some,” she said, in a way that meant almost none.
I moved to her kettle without waiting to be asked—it was still warm, which told me she hadn’t been up quite as long as I’d feared—and made myself a cup of coffee from the emergency stash of coffee bags she kept in the back of the cabinet specifically because I was here often enough that it had become a necessity. It was automatic, the same way breathing was automatic, to make a fresh cup of tea for her while I was at it, to drop the bag in, to set the timer in my head the way I knew she liked it. When both cups were done, I carried them to the table and sat down across from her, nudging the fresh mug into the space between her hands and waiting until I felt her fingers close around it before I let go.
She watched me do all of this with the slightly unfocused attention of someone running on fumes and sheer stubbornness in roughly equal measure, as if she was aware something kind was happening but didn’t quite have the bandwidth to respond to it.
We sat for a moment without speaking. Outside, the early morning light came in gray and thin through the kitchen window, pale and noncommittal and quiet.
“Tell me what he said,” I said. “The real version. Not the hallway version.”
She looked down at her mug. “The hallway version was accurate.”
“Ellie.”
She was quiet for another beat before something in her shoulders shifted a little. Her long, slow exhale seemed to come from somewhere deep down, somewhere she’d been holding tight since last night, and she told me all of it.
I stayed silent because I knew better than to say anything until she was finished.
“He asked me not to let fear talk me out of something real,” she said finally. Her voice had gone quiet and a little rough around the edges. She turned her mug in a slow circle on the table, eyes following the motion. “After that, he fell asleep right in front of me, just like that, and I sat there for another hour not knowing what to do with any of it. And then I came home and apparently did not sleep.”
I looked at her across the table. Her eyes had the red-rimmed, over-bright quality of exhaustion pushed well past its sensible limit, the particular rawness that came not from crying but from not sleeping and holding too much inside for too long. She’d been carrying all of this since yesterday—the drive to the hospital, the waiting room, the prognosis delivered in that careful clinical voice that Ray used when he was being kind—andthen this, on top of all of it. Her grandfather’s last request, sitting on her chest like something she couldn’t put down and couldn’t carry comfortably either.
I thought about Gus the way he’d looked in that bed. Smaller than I’d ever seen him. The monitor clipped to his finger, the IV taped into his arm, the hospital blanket pulled up in a way that somehow made him seem diminished, which felt wrong in a way I couldn’t quite articulate because Gus Granger had never once in my memory looked diminished by anything. He was a man who had never seemed afraid of much. And he was lying there afraid of one specific thing.
