Then Will gives the smallest nod. The kind of acknowledgment that carries more than agreement, something like a promise folded into the movement.
Dad watches him for another breath, and something in his face loosens. The tightness that has lived there for weeks,months, softens by degrees. His shoulders sink fractionally deeper into the pillows. His mouth settles into a line that is not quite a smile but is no longer an effort.
I feel it through his hand first—the tension easing out of his fingers.
His breathing shifts. Each inhale comes slower than the last, the gaps between them stretching until the room feels too big and too close all at once.
I tighten my grip instinctively, my thumb tracing the familiar ridge of his knuckle. “I pulled out Grandma’s recipe book you gave me,” I tell him, because silence feels too much like giving up. “I spent half the afternoon trying to figure out her handwriting again. I’m still convinced she wrote half of it in code.”
His eyelids flicker a faint response… enough to keep going. “I made sourdough last Sunday,” I continue softly. “Burned the first loaf. You would have pretended it was perfect anyway. You always did.”
The machines mark time for us with the soft, patient rhythm of numbers blinking, air moving, and something mechanical deciding when to speak.
“The kitchen still smells like you on Sunday mornings,” I hear myself say, and my voice sounds strange to my own ears, thinner than it should be, stretched over something fragile. I clear my throat without meaning to. “Coffee first. Always too strong, then flour, and then that awful radio station you insist is educational.”
I watch his chest rise.
It takes longer than it used to.
Fuck it feels like watching a tide go out.
My mind keeps trying to remember details as if that will make this manageable. The faint line between his brows. The way the lamplight catches in the silver at his temples. The texture ofhis skin beneath my thumb, familiar and suddenly terrifyingly finite.
Another breath comes.
Further apart.
“The mine’s okay,” I say, and I force steadiness into the words like I’m bracing a door against weather. “They’re taking care of it. Sin’s already stepped in. Ghost’s done half the work you would’ve done yourself. You… you made sure of that. You always made sure.” My fingers tighten around his before I can stop them, as though grip equals gravity and gravity equals staying. “You made sure I’d never have to hold anything alone.”
A low, internal realization that this is exactly what I am about to do.
Hold it.
All of it.
His chest rises again and falls again, each breath weaker than the one before it, like the world is slowly fading out around him, piece by piece.
I become acutely aware of Will at the edge of the room. Not because he moves, but because he doesn’t. Because he holds still like someone who understands that presence is sometimes the only offering that matters. His line is solid, a fixed point in a universe that has begun to slip sideways.
My voice keeps going because stopping feels like surrender. “I haven’t signed the lease in the bakery yet,” I tell him, my thumb brushing over the back of his hand as if I can keep him anchored here if I just don’t stop touching him. “I keep saying I will, but I keep finding reasons not to.”
I swallow, the words catching and then pushing through anyway. “The front area gets the best light in the morning,” I add, softer now. “You’d like it. Comes in through the front windows, hits the counter just right. Makes everything look… better than it is.”
My fingers tighten around his. “I still burn the first loaf,” I say, a small breath of a laugh that doesn’t quite make it all the way out. “Every time, you’d think I’d learn, but I don’t. I get distracted and…” My voice wavers, then steadies. “There’s flour everywhere, all the time,” I continue, because I have to. “It settles over everything. Even the things you don’t want it to. Makes it all look softer and perhaps forgivable.”
I shift a little closer. “I think you’d like it,” I murmur. “I think you’d sit by the window and pretend you weren’t watching me work, but you would be.”
I keep talking.
Like there is time.
His hand changes in mine.
Not abruptly.
Not enough to stop me.
Just… less.
