I look at him.
I look at Will.
I look at thesevenremaining days sitting inside my chest.
Queenie’s voice comes back to me on the cool air…
‘Don’t make him wait too long, dear. Life doesn’t.’
My mind drifts to my father sitting at that kitchen table, carrying those payments month after month in total silence, while no one around him realized how heavy they really were. To everything else, he’s held together over the years without ever letting anybody see the cracks.
Then to Will, and the look on his face when Sin’s call came through, his eyes finding me first before he could stop himself.
‘Like you’re already his.’
The porch boards are cool under me. The dark is soft. Inside, a father I love in the uncomplicated, enormous way you love someone who built the world around you, is keeping himselfawake for no discernible reason at the kitchen table, and a man I love, in terms I don’t yet have a word for, is sitting in the lamplight reading a book.
Sevendays.
I breathe in the desert air, then let it out slowly.
Sevendays, and then whatever this is becomes something else entirely.
I can waitsevendays.
At least…
… I think I can.
Chapter Nine
WILL
The Next Morning
The McClane Mine doesn’t look like much from the outside. A chain-link perimeter, a weathered security booth, a handful of vehicles scattered across a gravel lot that hasn’t been properly graded since probably the early nineties. But the second Millie steps out of the passenger side of my truck, the guy manning the booth lights up as if she’s the highlight of his entire shift, and something moves in my understanding of this place.
“Mornin’, Miss Millie!” he calls, lifting the boom gate before she even reaches him.
“Morning, Dale.” She gives him a wave that’s so warm, so completely unaffected, that I watch the older man’s shoulders relax. “How’s the knee holding up?”
“Better for seeing you,” he says, and I can’t even be annoyed at the line because he means it the way a grandfather means it.
She does that the entire morning. Walks through the mine as though she was born knowing every tunnel, every shaft, every name of every worker we pass. The miners greet her with an ease that tells me she’s been doing this for years. She knows their wives’ names, their kids’ ages, and which ones are on night shifts and therefore running on no sleep. She asks, she remembers, and she moves through this operation the way someone moves through a place that belongs to them, not in a proprietary way, but in the way of someone who genuinely loves what she sees.
I walk the perimeter first, check the entry points, note the blind spots, and do what Sin assigned me to do. But I keep finding reasons to circle back, which is not protocol.
It is, if I’m honest with myself, something else entirely.
I sit in her office for three hours while she works. She doesn’t make a big deal of my presence, doesn’t treat me like an intrusion, just sets a mug of coffee on the corner of her desk without asking how I take it, and carries on.Black, two sugars,she already knows, and I stare at that mug for a full minute before I pick it up.
The late afternoon finds us standing at the far edge of the main excavation area, looking down into the open cut while she explains the geological survey she’s been arguing with the board about for six months. She uses her hands when she talks, more animated than she is at the clubhouse, fully herself here, and it pulls at something inside me.
“They think I don’t understand the financials,” she says, and there’s no bitterness in it, just the kind of hard-earned certainty that comes from knowing exactly how men like them think because she’s spent years surviving beside them. “But Dad taught me this business from the ground up. Literally.” She glances down into the dirt. “He used to bring me here when I was seven. Let me sit on the big machinery and pretend to drive.”
“He sounds like a great dad,” I say.
She pauses for a moment, and the quality of that silence changes. Something careful moves through it. “He is.” She swallows. “He’s also sick, Will.” She doesn’t look at me when she says it. Her eyes stay on the cut earth below, on the darkness her family has been pulling a living from. “Pancreatic cancer. Stage four.”
