“So have I,” I admit, still half-dizzy.
Somewhere behind us, someone whoops, someone else claps. Deek swears loudly about finally getting some peace from the tension.
I don’t look away from Will.
Not now.
Not when he finally has everything he fought for stitched onto his back and standing right in front of him.
I turn in Will’s hold to look back at him, keeping his hand in mine, and Dad is watching us from his chair with an expression I have only seen on his face a handful of times in my life. It’s not happiness, exactly, though happiness is inside it. There is something larger than happiness. An expression he’s been carrying for years and has finally found a place safe enough to let it go.
He looks at Will.
Something passes between them, two men who have sat at kitchen tables, eaten eggs, passed the butter, and said the important things in the only language Dad has ever really used for them, the language of presence, of showing up and being counted.
Will nods once.
My father’s eyes close briefly, and when they open again, they find me.
He smiles. It is the smile I have been keeping in the most protected part of myself for nineteen years, the one he has given me from the beginning, from the earliest memory I have of being loved by him. It is complete, certain, and full of everything he hasn’t said and doesn’t need to.
I hold onto it.
Hold onto it hard because I know moments like this don’t come around often, and some part of me already wants to memorize exactly how it feels before it’s gone.
Will’s hand is warm in mine.
My father is watching.
And for this one held breath of a moment, between everything that has been and everything that is coming, it is enough.
It is more than enough.
It iseverything.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
MILLIE
One Month Later
The lamp on my father’s bedside table is still on, casting its low amber glow across the room, and I can hear his breathing from the armchair where I’ve been sitting for the last hour. It has changed. I noticed it the moment I woke, some instinct pulling me up from a light, fitful sleep, and I knew before I was fully conscious that something had shifted.
Will is awake, too. He’s in the chair by the door, and his eyes find mine across the room the moment I lift my head, and the steadiness in his expression tells me he has been listening to it as long as I have.
My father’s chest rises and falls, and the space between those two things is longer than it should be.
I cross to the bed and take Dad’s hand, carefully, the way I have learned to do everything in these past months, with a gentleness that acknowledges how much has changed without making him feel fragile. His eyes open when I settle beside him, slow and heavy-lidded, and he looks at me the way he has been looking at me lately, with a thoroughness to it, like he is memorizing something.
“Millie girl,” he says, and his voice is low and rough with tiredness.
“I’m here,” I tell him. “I’m right here.”
Will moves from the doorway to the other side of the room without making a sound. He doesn’t come to the bed, he positions himself close enough that I know he’s there, far enough that the space beside my father belongs to me.
I reach for my phone on the nightstand, the instinct sharp and immediate. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
My father’s hand tightens around mine with a firmness that surprises me. “No.”
