“My dad also has a meeting with his lawyer this week,” I say, because the thought surfaces the way it always does now, without invitation, from the place where I keep the things I can’t look at directly for too long. “To update some documents.”
“Does he say what kind?”
“No.” I finally take a seat and wrap my hand back around my mug. “And I didn’t ask.”
Penny knows me well enough not to push on that. She refills her own coffee from the pot on the counter and returns to her chair. We move on, the way we always do, onto easier things. Her flower shop, the winter orchid arrangement she’s been trying to source for a client, and a movie I saw midweek that she would like to give her opinion on, whether it’s possible to have an opinion on something you haven’t seen.
“You absolutely can,” she insists. “You’ll have my opinion. Which I will give you in sufficient detail, and that’s functionally the same thing.”
“That’s not how opinions work.”
“It’sexactlyhow opinions work, Millie.”
Dad reappears from his armchair for a second cup of coffee and joins us at the kitchen table for twenty minutes of conversation that he clearly enjoys even as he pretends it is simply an incidental consequence of being in the same room. Penny has always been able to make Dad laugh, a skill most people don’t have and one I suspect she’s proud of. Hedisappears back to his chair before twelve, with the contentment that comes from good company and good coffee, no words needed.
Eventually, I walk Penny to the door. She pulls on her coat while standing in the doorway, the cold February air curling in around her, and glances back at me before she goes. “For what it’s worth…” she says. “The four seconds? They counted.” She squeezes my arm once, then she’s down the porch steps, into her car, and I close the door, standing in the hall for a moment with the quiet settling back in around me.
In the living room, Dad’s armchair creaks softly—the paper shifts, followed by the low, steady turn of a page.
I go back to the kitchen and pick up my cell phone from the counter. There are no new messages. The screen is exactly what it was when I set it down an hour ago.
Will is at the clubhouse. He has club things to do, three weeks until the biggest moment of the last two years of his life, and he is absolutelynotthinking about the four seconds in the dark of my father’s office.
I set the phone face down on the counter.
The Manila folder from the mine is in my bag, hanging on the hook beside the kitchen door. My father’s documents, and the reason I was at the mine property in the first place on Friday night, the reason any of this happened. Even though I haven’t opened them, there’s something in me that feels the folder’s weight from across the room, a low, insistent pull that I’ve been choosing not to acknowledge.
I’ll open them tomorrow.
I think it. Then I think it again.
I’ll open them tomorrow.
As I have for two days, and I know, in the part of myself that doesn’t tolerate bullshit, that tomorrow is going to stretch further than I intend.
I spin around for more coffee, I listen to my father turn another page, and I rest my fingertips against the cold screen of my phone.
Three weeks.
I can wait three weeks.
I’m almost certain I believe that.
Chapter Five
WILL
The Next Morning
Ghost doesn’t pace when something’s bothering him. He goes dead still instead, which is honestly a whole lot more unnerving than watching somebody wear grooves into the floor.
He’s standing in front of the main screen in the tech den with his arms crossed, watching the data scroll past with that tight, locked-in focus that usually means he’s already figured the problem out and is waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
Sin stands beside him, one shoulder propped against the wall. His poker chip turns between his fingers, slow and unhurried, one rotation, then another, at odds with the tight set of his jaw.
“How far back?” Sin asks.
“Six months.” Ghost’s voice carries no inflection. He taps the keyboard, and the screen rearranges itself into a timeline, rows of encrypted traffic spiking at irregular intervals across six months. “This is not reactive. They didn’t start watching the mine because of Friday night. Friday night was a consequence. They’ve been building a picture of the property for months. Access points, security rotation, and floodlight positions. They know what the cameras cover and, more importantly… what they don’t.”
