The sound that comes out of me is not dignified. It is the sound of someone who held everything together through a frustratingly long night and is now faced with the one thing they couldn’t prepare for. I press my free hand over my mouth and breathe through it, one deliberate breath after another, willing myself to hold on just a little longer.
“Dad…” I manage. “You’re theonlything that matters right now. You’re sitting in a hospital bed, and you are theonlything I care about.”
He shakes his head, slow and certain. “No,” he says. “He is.He has been for two years. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I’m not going to lie in this bed and pretend otherwise.” He looks at me with an expression that is entirely clear of ambiguity. “Go get him, Millie. You have my blessing…” He pauses. “You’ve always had my blessing. I was just too proud to say it until I had to.”
I lean forward and press my forehead against his hand and stay there for a long moment while the machines beep steadily around us, the hospital morning continues on its way without us, and the tightness in my chest does something complicated that isn’t quite grief and isn’t quite relief and is mostly just love—the enormous, exhausting, unconditional weight of it.
“I love you,” I say into the blanket.
“I know,” he says, patting my hand the way he has been patting my hand since I was four years old. “I love you too. Now stop crying on my hospital blanket.”
I pull back and find him looking at me with the dry, gentle humor that is his most fundamental mode of expression, the onethat has carried us through nineteen years of hard things, and I laugh despite myself, a short, fractured sound that turns into something else and then back again.
“You’re impossible,” I tell him.
“Stubbornness,” he says. “You got it from me.”
He closes his eyes, the exertion of the conversation settling over him. His grip on my hand loosens, but doesn’t release. I sit with him until his breathing deepens and evens out into real sleep, proper sleep, the unguarded kind, and I sit for a little while longer. Then I stand up, gently squeeze his hand, and move out into the corridor, seeing Deek asleep on a plastic chair.
I smile as I walk past, without waking him.
I can’t believe he stayed.
The hallway is long, and I walk to the far end of it, away from the nurses’ station, where there’s a window that looks out over the hospital parking lot and, beyond it, a slice of city skyline going gold at the edges. I press my shoulder against the glass and dial Sin, who picks up on the second ring.
“Millie.” His voice is alert, already reading me.
“He’s awake,” I say. “He’s stable. He’s talking…” I pause to let that settle before he has to ask. “He’s gonna be okay.”
The silence on his end is brief, but it carries something I don’t have a name for, like he’s setting down the weight of last night. “Good,” he says. “That’s good, Millie.”
“Ghost has what he needs?” I ask because I need to know and because asking keeps my hands from shaking.
“Ghost has everything,” Sin says. “Maria’s been across the evidence chain since yesterday. The detective running the case is a good cop, and what Ghost found is not something he can look past. We even have the new name of the head of the Alliance. Some asshole called Roman is calling the shots now. Not for long, though. But Millie… Will’s being released this morning.”
I close my eyes and press them tight, tipping my head back against the glass. The information moves through me, flooding every place that has been braced, since the moment I stood in the clubhouse parking lot and watched the police take him away. “This morning?” I ask to make sure.
“This morning,” Sin confirms. “We’ll be there.”
I breathe for a moment. In, and all the way out. “Good. That’s good.” I straighten and look out the window at the parking lot below, the ordinary, unremarkable activity of people coming and going from their own crises. “Sin, there’s something else.”
He hesitates. “I’m listening.”
“Dad didn’t just have a heart issue… he’s sick,realsick.”
Sin sighs down the line. “I know. Will told me the day of his ceremony.”
I widen my eyes in shock. Not in anger, just a little jilted that Will said anything. “Oh…” is all I can manage.
“Don’t be pissed at him, Mills. You put him in a hell of a spot. And I get why you didn’t want us knowing. It’s personal. But Will’s got a duty to the club too, and there was no way he was getting patched in while keeping something this big from us. It was the right call for his patch. Doesn’t mean it didn’t tear him up breaking his word to you. Trust me, he didn’t want to tell me. He held onto that secret right up until the eleventh hour, if that helps at all.”
Slumping my shoulders, I nod, even though Sin can’t see me. It does help. “I’m sorry we didn’t tell you.”
Sin makes a clicking sound with his tongue. “Hey, we all process things differently. It’s a shit of a thing, Mills.”
My eyes begin to mist, my bottom lip quivering as I think about what it all means. So, I shake my head, gathering my emotions, and move on. “The documents,” I say. “The ones I collected from the mine office the night the Alliance scouts breached the perimeter. I’ve had them in my bag for weeks,and I haven’t opened them.” I hear him absorb this without interruption. “There’s a letter from Dad. There are instructions. He mentioned before everything went sideways that he’d been to see his lawyer, that things were‘in order,’and I think whatever he means by that, whatever he’s set up, it’s referenced in those documents.” I stop for a moment to sort through what I know and what I’m guessing at. “I don’t know what’s in them, Sin. But he told me once, a long time ago, that I’d know when the time was right to open them.”
Sin is silent for a moment, and when he speaks, his voice is measured and deliberate. “And you think the time is right?”
