I think about my father at home in his chair, or more likely in bed by now, his body slower than it was, his nights longer. I think about him at his desk three years ago, opening a fresh ledger, writing the first entry in that careful, precise hand of his, making a record of the worst thing that had ever happened to him, because that was the only form of resistance available to him. And Dad was not a man who accepted helplessness without doing the thing, however small, that wasn’t helpless.
He spent years building the weapon.
Tonight we fired it.
“Will,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Thank you… for what you said earlier. About what Dad was building it for.”
He pauses. “It’s what I believe.”
“I know it is.” I look at him. “That’s what made it matter.”
He’s looking at me with that steady attention that I have spent two years pretending not to need and have entirely given up pretending about.
“Let’s go home,” I say. “Dad’ll be waiting.”
Will nods, and he doesn’t immediately reach for his keys. Instead, he looks at me for one moment longer, the kind of look that doesn’t need a word underneath it.
Then he stands, takes my hand, and we leave.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
WILL
The Next Day
Sunday has a quality at the clubhouse that weekdays never quite manage. Something slower and more settled. The kind of afternoon where the light comes through the high windows at a low angle, lands warm across the floorboards, and nobody feels the need to fill the quiet with purpose.
Two days since the will reading.
Two days since Jonas looked at me from his armchair and said,‘You take care of the business, the mine, and whatever she needs. I expect you to take care of her, not just the business,’and I stood in his doorway holding those words like something that needed both hands.
I’m leaning against the bar with a beer I haven’t touched much, watching the room. This is where I tend to end up when I’m thinking about something. The bar gives me a wall at my back and a clear line of sight to the rest of the space, which is a habit I picked up during two years of prospecting and never managed to shed.
The room’s packed the way it always is on Sundays. Not loud chaos, but it is not tense either. Just full of people who have spent enough years together that nobody feels the need to constantly fill the space with noise to prove everything’s okay.
Victoria is on the sofa, absolutely formidable, and has somehow also brought a throw pillow. A good one, by the looks of it. The kind with actual structure. It sits now in the corner of the sofa where she has settled herself. Sin is seated at the opposite end of the same sofa, and I watched him clock the pillow when she put it there and say absolutely nothing.
He has learned.
It took him a while, buthe has learned.
Victoria is currently annotating something in the notebook she carries everywhere, her legs tucked to one side, one hand resting on her bump. Every so often, she looks up at the room with that precise, unhurried attention of hers, the instinct of someone who spent years reading situations professionally and never fully put it down.
Marley and Sage have found each other, the way they always do. They’re at the far end of the room, heads tilted together over something on Marley’s phone. Marley’s long red hair falls forward over her shoulder, her glasses are slightly crooked the way they often are by the afternoon, and she’s gesturing with one hand like she’s got plenty to say about whatever she’s looking at.
Ghost is inhis corner. That corner has beenhis cornersince before I started prospecting, and I suspect it will remainhis corneruntil one of us carries him out of this building in a box. Which, at Ghost’s current estimated rate of emotional self-preservation, could plausibly be some time away. What is different today is that Sage has brought him coffee from outside.
Not the clubhouse coffee.
Not the communal pot that has been draining into the same ancient machine for six years.
Coffee from outside, in a paper cup with a cardboard sleeve.
I watched him look at it when she handed it to him. It was not a long look, but it was a considerable one, the kind Ghost gives to new information that requires him to update a prior assessment.
