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“Gray.” Dom’s voice comes sharp at my back, and his hand closes around my shoulder before I’ve gone two steps, solid enough to stop me. “Before you go. This thing I’ve been trying to tell you all week. I need you to hear it from me before you hear it somewhere else… I should’ve said it three days ago and I didn’t, and that’s on me.”

I turn around. His face twisted into an expression that turns my stomach sour. The same one he had when he called me at two in the morning junior year and told me his sister’s father had been killed by a drunk driver.

“I don’t know if I can take any more bad news,” I say, my hand dropping off the door frame.

“Look, I⁠—”

My phone buzzes in my back pocket, and I pull it out to find Maggie’s caller ID.

My chest does what it does every time Maggie’s name shows up on my phone without warning, a small cold drop that I haven’t been able to train myself out of in eighteen months of managing my father’s deterioration from a distance. I haven’t heard from her since she asked for his medical paperwork almost a month ago.

“It’s Maggie,” I say, pointing at the phone as I turn to leave out the side door. “We’ll talk about this later, okay?”

“Yeah, just call me later,” he says, scratching the back of his neck.

The humidity hits me the second I push through the bay door, thick and salt-heavy, the kind of August heat that makes the air sit on you. The sky to the west has gone the color of a bruise, and the wind off the water has died down to nothing, the way it always does right before the rain comes.

“Hey, Mags.” I close the bay door behind me.

“Grayson, sweetheart, hi.” Her voice comes in shaky and too fast, the sweetness in it stretched thin. “We’re home. Your dad and me.”

“Home,” I repeat, the word landing flat. The first spots of rain darken the concrete past the door. “When did you land?”

“This morning.” A wet breath comes down the line. “He’s bad, sweetheart. The worst he has been since the diagnosis. The UTI cleared two weeks ago, so he should’ve been back to his baseline by now. But he isn’t coming back to baseline, Gray. I think this might just be where we are now.”

My free hand finds the edge of the door frame and presses into it, the metal lip biting into my palm. I let it.

“I’m twenty minutes out, Mags,” I say, my keys already out of my pocket and cutting into my palm.

Her voice goes thin. “He’s sleeping right now, but I think it’d be best if you came home.”

“I’m on my way.” I end the call before she can finish.

I pocket the phone and cut back through the bay without stopping. Dom is probably in the break room with Kendall already, and I don’t have it in me to say goodbye to anyone right now. I push through the side door into the rain without a word to the empty bay behind me.

The whole drive home I think about my father.

A UTI is nothing, really. It doesn’t take out a man as great as Richard Douglas.

There’s no way he should’ve deteriorated so quickly. Maggie said he isn’t coming back to baseline, her voice breaking like even she can’t believe what she is saying. Denise, his personal nurse, never said anything about him spiraling like this in her weekly updates. I should have never made myself believe that each new development was temporary, that the fog would lift, that the man I remember would still be in there.

That when I get back home, my father will be sitting in his chair with his glasses on the bridge of his nose and a book in his hand looking out of the kitchen window, and he’ll read aloud his favorite passage to me like he did when I was a child.

He is going to be fine, I tell myself. He has to be fine. I’m not ready for him not to be here.

Route 9 is slick and dark under my tires, and the rain is coming harder now. By the time I take the long gravel drive up to the house, the wipers are working at full speed and the tree line at the back of the property is barely visible through the windshield.

I barely cut the engine before I’m out of the car and rushing into the house. It’s so quiet I can hear every drop of rain that hits the windows.

Iris is sitting on the stairs, still in her bakery clothes, a dusting of flour on the knee of her jeans, her hair half out of its bun, eyes red at the rims. She looks up when I come in and her nose twitches in that way it does when she is trying to hold herself together in front of me specifically.

“Hey, stranger,” she says, her voice coming out rough around the edges.

“Hey, Bubbles.” I close the door behind me and look at her. “How long have you been home?”

“Since three.” She drags the back of her wrist under her nose, pulling her knees to her chest. A plate of butter cookies sitting next to her.“Maggie called me.”

I nod once.