Millie.
Seeing her with a hospital gown on and those ugly ass socks … it broke me. This was one more thing my fucking father had interfered with. If anything happened to this woman on his account, I would kill him. She had wires coming out of her chest and an IV in her arm and she looked nervous as all hell.
“Hey.” I tried to keep my voice light and failed.
“Hey.” She fake smiled.
I sat in the chair next to her, and took her cold hand in mine. “Nervous?”
She nodded. “A little. I’ve never had surgery before.”
Fuck you, Wayne, you selfish motherfucker.
“Truck is right outside. We can bail out the emergency exit,” I told her.
She gave me a stern look. “Stop.”
With a sigh, I reached out and brushed a hair away from her forehead. “I have a confession,” I told her.
Her eyes went wide and she nodded for me to continue.
“I wasn’t so much mad about finding out that I had Colin’s heart as I … I was jealous.” I threaded my fingers through hers. She opened her mouth to speak and I placed a finger to her lips to quiet her.
“I was jealous that thisamazingwoman was so perfectly loved by this dude that she’d be willing to stalk a random guy just to be closer to a tiny part of him.”
She grinned. “Stalk is a heavy word.”
“Heavily accurate,” I told her, and she laughed.
I wanted to make her laugh forever.Please let me make her laugh forever.
“Millie…” I looked her right in the eyes. “I just hope that I can love you even a fraction of what he so clearly did.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks and she nodded. “You already have.” Leaning forward, she kissed my lips, and for the first time since I was a kid I prayed to God to protect this woman. Protect my future. Give me a million more days to love her.
* * *
“The doctor was twerpy looking,”I told Gran as my ankle bopped up and down. I’d had so many coffees I felt sick to my stomach.
“He was fine,” Gran told me, looking up at me from over her needlepoint. I looked at the pattern and felt a tiny bit of my tension ease.
Happy as a fuckin’ clam,was stitched in black, and she was working on a big clam right underneath.
“You should make something for the new bar. No hipsters welcome, or something like that.”
Gran smiled; she had nerves of steel that woman. After everything she’d been through in her life, not much could shake her. So when one of the doctors who’d operated on Millie and Wayne walked in, I leapt into the air, running at him while Gran calmly set her needlepoint down and stood slowly.
“How’d it go?”
“Your father—”
“I don’t care about him, tell me about Millie first.” Was this guy high? The first thing you should say when you walked out is that everything went fine. Unless it wasn’t fine and then I wanted to fucking know about it. Now.
He frowned. “She’s fine. He’s fine. The surgery went great. Millie has a healthy liver and we were able to get enough of the right lobe to ensure your father has many more years left.”
I grabbed my chest, feeling the tension dissipate. “You need to start with that next time, man.”
He smiled. “They’re both in recovery. Once they wake, you can see them.”
