The words don’t register immediately.
I stare at her. “Dismiss,” I repeat.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In the morning.”
The air leaves my lungs in a rush, and I drop back into the chair, forearms braced on my thighs, hands hanging uselessly between my knees.
For a long moment, neither of us speaks.
Then I look up at her again. “The Alliance tried to bury me with their own records.”
“Yes,” she answers.
I nod once. “Then they just made a very expensive mistake.”
I let it settle through every layer of the last few days, through the arrest, the handcuffs, and the clubhouse going silent as they walked me out, through the charge sheets, the cell, and the loneliness of lying in a narrow institutional cot at night. Knowing the people I love are out there somewhere in the city, managing things I can’t touch from in here.
Released in the morning.
Dad makes a sound beside me. Not quite a word, something lower, pulled from deeper than speech, the kind of sound that comes from a tension held too long, and finally letting go.
I look at my hands on the table.
Tomorrow.
***
That night, back in the cell, I don’t sleep well. I’ve gotten used to the sounds of the place by now, the way you get used to sounds when you have no choice. The low hum of the ventilation system, the distant clang of doors that have no predictable rhythm, and the acoustics of a corridor that carries sound further than it should.
I lie on my back, looking at the ceiling, and I let my mind go where it’s been trying to go for days…
Millie’s kitchen at two in the morning.
The lamp on the table, the mine accounts spread between us, her pen moving down columns of figures in that focused, unhurried way she has of approaching complicated things. The way she handed me a mug of coffee without asking how I took it, because by then she already knew. The way the house felt around us, lived-in and steady, every part of it carrying the kind of careyou only notice in places that actually mean something to the people inside them.
Her voice in the recording cracked down the middle.
‘I love him, Dad.’
I think about the kitchen kiss, about the porch. The first time I let myself move toward her instead of away, the single honest moment of careful, deliberate distance, and how it felt like something in me had been waiting for exactly that long to finally stop pretending it wasn’t there.
I think about Jonas watching across the clubhouse at the ceremony that never happened. The way Dad looked at me when I was arrested. The fact that my father, a man who communicates more through silence than through speech and whose judgment I have trusted without reservation my entire life, has liked Jonas McClane from their third conversation, because he recognized something… two men who built things slowly and meant them to last.
I think about the patch on the table back at the clubhouse. Moments from being mine and then suddenly on hold, and the ache of that, not rage, panic, or the desperate grab for what was almost in reach, just the steady, patient certainty that it will still be there.
Everything will still be there.
I close my eyes.
For the first time since they put cuffs on my wrists in the clubhouse and walked me out past the patch ceremony cake, I breathe in slowly, all the way, filling my lungs completely, and I breathe out again.
All the way out.
Long.
