I leave it there.
Twenty minutes later, the door clicks open behind me, and Penny comes in on a rush of cold air and determination. She hasn’t said hello or asked anything yet. She just looks at me, really looks, then unbuttons her coat and hangs it up with careful hands before crossing the kitchen and sitting opposite me like that space has always belonged to her.
My father’s documents are spread across the table. The recipe book is open somewhere in the middle, at a page I wasn’t looking at on purpose. My hands are in my lap as I stare aimlessly at the pile.
“I don’t know how to save everyone,” I say. Not to myself, not to the room, but to Penny, because she’s the only person I say the real things to when I can’t say them anywhere else.
Penny hesitates for a moment. She’s looking at the documents, at the recipe book, at me. When she speaks, she doesn’t offer comfort, because she’s known me long enough to understand that comfort right now would be useless.
“You don’t have to save everyone,” she says. “You have to save the one that matters right now.”
I look at the recipe book. At my father’s neat handwriting on the inside cover, where he cataloged the index forty years ago and never updated it because he liked the imperfection of the gaps. At Will’s name, which isn’t written anywhere in this house but is everywhere in it.
“Which one?” I ask.
Penny holds my gaze for a long moment. “You know which one,” she says.
And she’s right.
I do.
I press my palms flat against the table, I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, and I let the McClane composure do what it’s built to do, which is hold the pieces in place until you can figure out where they go.
Tomorrow, Ghost will work.
Maria Moretti will ask the right questions.
The club will move.
But tonight, I sit at my father’s table with my hands on the wood he chose and the book he loved, and I understand something about the kind of love that doesn’t announce itself. The kind that builds slowly, pays its dues without complaint, and keeps holding the line no matter how heavy things get.
My father had it.
He gave it to me.
Will has it too.
He called me first.
I hold that thought carefully, the way you hold something you don’t want to drop, and I let it be enough to carry me through until morning.
I have to, because right now, I don’t have anything else.
Chapter Nineteen
WILL
Day Two
The holding cell smells like goddamn industrial cleaner over something older and less identifiable, the layered scent of a space that has housed too many people moving through the worst hours of their lives.
The light overhead doesn’t change. There is no indication of whether it is morning or evening unless someone passes in the corridor with a meal tray, and even then, the fluorescent glow makes everything look the same shade of gray. I have stopped trying to track time and started simply existing inside it.
I’m sitting on the edge of the narrow cot with my forearms on my knees, my hands loose between them, and I’m thinking clearly.
That, in itself, feels significant.
The detective who comes in looks like he hasn’t missed a detail in years. Lean build, pressed shirt, eyes that don’t wander. He sets his notes down carefully, like even paper has rules it should follow. He watches me longer than most would.
