* * *
The back porch of the clubhouse faces east, which means it catches neither the sunset nor the glare of the Strip, just the dark shelf of the Mojave stretching out into the distance, flat, honest, and entirely without performance.
I come out here when I need the kind of sky that clears my head.
The night is cold enough that I can see my breath, thin white clouds dispersing into the black above the railing. The city noise is present but distant out here, muffled into something almost abstract, the kind of sound that tells you the world is still moving without demanding you move with it.
I lean against the railing and look out at the dark. I’ve done this before. Sat with something heavy in my chest and forced myself to wait it out instead of grabbing for it too early, but this doesn’t feel hopeless or numb. It feels loaded. The kind ofwaiting that only works because you know there’s an end coming eventually, even if it’s taking forever to get there.
I know what I’m waiting for.
I know what I’m going to do when the waiting ends.
I’ve known for a long damn time. Probably longer than I ever wanted to admit out loud. It’s just been sitting there in my chest all this time, steady and stubborn, not demanding anything from me except patience.
Waiting for the timing to stop being a problem.
However, tonight there’s something else sitting alongside the patience, something that Deek put into words in the kitchen this afternoon in that uncharacteristically quiet voice, and it’s been moving around inside me ever since, looking for somewhere to settle.
‘She was scared last night.’
But she held it together. She called Sin, and she did everything right. And the whole time she was crouched behind that desk in the dark, she was managing it alone, the same way she manages most things, because life taught her a long time ago that she had to.
I drove her home and said none of the things I’m not allowed to say yet. She sat beside me with her father’s documents on her lap, her composure carefully in place. I watched her the way I always do, out of the corner of my eye, holding thosetwenty-onedays between us like the mother of brick fucking walls.
I press my hands flat against the cold metal of the railing.
The mine check-ins start tomorrow. I’ll make two passes, morning and evening, fold them into the circuit as I said, keep it clean, professional, and exactly what it needs to be. I’ll report anything unusual to Ghost, keep my head straight, and do the damn job.
I have waited two years.
Icanwait three more weeks.
I lean on the railing, breathe the cold desert air, and look out at the flat, honest dark, and I let the certainty of it settle back into place.
Three weeks.
And then everything changes.
I get my patch, and Ifinallyget my girl.
Chapter Four
MILLIE
The Next Morning
Sunday mornings have a distinct smell in this house.
It’s the smell of my father, Jonas McClane, who wakes before the sun has fully committed to the idea of rising, who grinds his coffee beans by hand because the electric grinder is, in his words, ‘an indignity to the bean,’ and who has the newspaper spread across the kitchen table before I’ve even made it down the hallway in my socks. Roasted coffee, newsprint, and the faint warm ghost of last night’s dinner still cling to the air. It’s the smell of something that has always been here, something that was here before I was born and will be here long after I stop noticing it.
But I notice it every time.
Especially now.
I pad into the kitchen dressed in my oldest sweater, the oversized charcoal one with the fraying sleeve hem that Dad has been threatening to throw away for three years and has never once touched, and I find him exactly where he always is. Elbows on the table, paper folded to the section he’s reading, coffee steaming at his right elbow. The reading glasses perched on the end of his nose make him look deeply, personally offended by whatever the front page has decided to say today.
“Morning,” I say.
