My best friend, Penny, rolls in at ten-forty-seven, which for her basically counts as early. She smells faintly of eucalyptus and delivers the kind of chaos that seems permanently attached to her. She owns the flower shop in town and has known me since high school, which means she is firmly outside the orbit of club business andexactlywho I need right now.
I pull her through the front door and into the kitchen. “Hey,” I say, at a barely legible volume.
Penny blinks at me, still half in her jacket. “Good morning to you, too. Very normal greeting. Nothing alarming about any of this.”
“Sit down.” She sits because she knowsthat voice. She has knownthat voicesince we were thirteen years old, sharing a locker at school, and she has learned over those years that whenI use it, something worth hearing has either happened or is about to be explained in significant detail.
She shrugs her coat the rest of the way off her shoulders, folds it over the back of the chair, then looks at me with that calm, waiting focus she’s had since we were teens. “Okay,” she says. “Talk.”
“It was the sensors,” I start, already talking too fast. “At the east fence. I thought it was foxes or wind or something stupid, but it wasn’t stupid, it was two men, Penny. Twoactualmen just… walking, like they owned the place. Like they were measuring it.”
She opens her mouth, but I keep going. “I hid. I didn’t even think about it, I just hid behind Dad’s desk. I could hear my pulse. Likeactuallyhear it. And I called Sin, and my voice sounded—” I make a face, and shake my head. “Not like mine. Like someone who’s already accepted something bad is about to happen.”
“Mill—”
“And then I had to wait.Eight minutes. Do you know how long eight minutes is when you’re convinced you’re about to be found? It’s not eight minutes. It’s… geological time. I swear I aged.”
Penny sighs, stands, and reaches for the kettle.
I begin to pace. “And then the door opened, and I thought…fuck!I don’t even know what I thought. But it was Will. Just standing there like he’d always been there. Like he was part of the b-building.” My voice falters. “He just… l-looked at me. He found me immediately. As if he knewexactlywhere I’d be.”
Penny sets a mug down in front of me.
But I don’t sit, I continue pacing. “He came straight over, didn’t hesitate. He just dropped to the floor next to me and said,‘You okay?’As though that was the only question that mattered in the entire world.” I swallow. “And I wasn’t. I mean, I was,technically. But also not.” Penny watches me, her eyebrows slightly raised. “And then he took my hand,” I say, that part comes out quieter. “He didn’t even think about it. He just did it. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.”
Penny finally speaks, “Take a breath.”
I inhale like I’ve just remembered how.
“He held it out…” I say, my voice relaxing “… and he just... waited. He didn’t make it a thing. He just offered his hand and let me decide.”
Penny is very still across the table from me.
“And I took it,” I continue, because there’s no version of this story where I don’t say that part. “And when I was standing, when we were both standing in the dark with the engines from the bikes running outside, I didn’t let go. Not immediately.”
“How long?” Penny asks, and there is absolutely nothing careless about the way she asks it.
“Three seconds, maybe… four.” I pick up the mug, pace for a few steps, and then set it back down on the table with a small, deliberate click, dropping back down into my seat. “Long enough that it wasn’t about standing up anymore.”
Penny looks at me for a long moment. “Millie,” she says.
“I know.”
“You are insooomuch trouble.”
“I know!” I say, my voice wavering unexpectedly. It’s only now, sitting in my father’s kitchen on a Sunday morning with the paper turning in the next room, that I realize those two words carry more than I’ve let myself feel. “I really do know, Penny.”
She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, the way she’s been doing since we were teenagers, and we sit here in the silence of two people who have been telling each other hard truths long enough to know when one doesn’t need any commentary added to it.
“He’s a good man,” she says eventually.
“He is.”
“And what does your dad think?” She glances toward the living room.
“He told me Will was good to have around. In that specific, very deliberate Jonas McClane way where he’s not saying anything at all and saying everything simultaneously.”
Penny presses her lips together, clearly fighting a smile and losing. “Your dad has excellent taste.”
