“Dad.”
“No hospital, Amelia.” His eyes are fully open now, and clear, clearer than they’ve been all week, with that clarity that I am only just beginning to understand the meaning of. “I’ve already been to the hospital enough times. I want to be here. I want to be in my own bed.”
My throat closes over. “But the paramedics could make you more comfortable. They could—”
“Millie.” Will’s voice comes low from just behind me.
I turn, and the look on his face hits me straight in the chest.
It’s the expression he gets when he’s already made up his mind about something hard. Something that’s going to cost him, but he’s doing it anyway because walking away from it was never really an option.
His jaw is set, his eyes are steady, and he holds my gaze for a moment before he speaks, “Let me call the palliative care team to come and make him comfortable here,” he says, careful and measured. “They can do that. And then he stays home…” He pauses. “He told me yesterday. This is where he wants to be.”
I stare at him. I know what he is telling me. I know what yesterday was. The hour they spent together alone in the living room, the hour I have not asked about. Whatever my father said to Will in that room, he has been carrying it since, and right now he is handing me the part I need.
My father squeezes my hand again. “Let the boy call them,” he says, a faint, unmistakable note of satisfaction in his voice at being able to refer to Will that way. The way he has been referring to him for the last month, as the boy, as though Will were something he had chosen himself, which I suppose he had.
I nod because I don’t trust my voice, and Will steps out of the room. I hear him on the phone in the hallway, calm and precise, giving the address, describing what’s happening with a clarity that tells me he has prepared himself for this, that he knew this was coming and made sure he would know what to do when it did. The sound of it, his voice through the wall, measured and certain, is the thing that keeps me from coming apart entirely.
I sit on the edge of the bed, and I hold my father’s hand in both of mine, and I look at him. “I’m scared,” I tell him, because I am, and because he has always deserved my honesty more than my composure.
“I know,” he says, and something in his face softens. “You’ve been brave enough for both of us for a long time now. You can put that down.”
My eyes fill. “Daddy, I don’t want you to go.”
“I know that too.” He lifts his free hand, slowly, and puts it over mine. His hands are large and warm, my father’s hands, the hands that carried me through mine shafts and fixed fences and turned newspaper pages over Sunday breakfast for as long as I can remember. “But I’ve had everything I wanted. You know that, don’t you? I’ve had the mine, and the club, and good years with your mother, and then I’ve had you. And last week…” His mouth moves into an absolutely genuine smile. “Last month I watched that young man walk out of that Chapel.”
“Don’t,” I say softly, because I am already too full.
“I’m just saying…” he says, with satisfaction, like everything has gone exactly the way he intended, “… that I’m not leaving anything unfinished.”
The knock is soft.
Will opens the door before the knock has even fully stopped echoing through the house, and two palliative care workers step inside, moving fast without making a production out of it.
Their boots barely make a sound on the timber floor, but the equipment they’re carrying sure as hell does.
“Hi, Mr. McClane,” the woman says, crouching beside the bed like she’s greeting him in a café rather than at the edge of his life. “We’re just going to make you a bit more comfortable, okay?”
Dad gives the smallest nod. The kind that costs him.
I don’t move from where I’m sitting. My hand stays wrapped around his, fingers tucked into the familiarity of him, like I can memorize it by touch alone. The man checks the monitor. The woman adjusts the pillows with a care that feels almost clinical, lifting him fractionally, settling him again as though the bed has become sacred ground.
They speak to him as if he is still entirely himself.
“Any pain?”
He simply blinks like that’s a stupid question.
“Okay. We’ll help with that.”
A syringe clicks, tape tears softly, fabric shifts. Every sound feels amplified and impossibly far away at the same time.
I watch their hands.
I watch them never rush him.
I watch the way they give him dignity in small increments.
