I nod. “Yes, sir… I mean, yeah, I will.”
He rolls his eyes, closing the door behind me, and from somewhere in the house comes the sound of the television, and under it, from the direction of the kitchen, the soft sounds of someone moving around with comfortable familiarity. The smell of something warm and vanilla-sweet fills the entire hallway.
“She’s in the kitchen,” Jonas says, already moving back toward his armchair.
I find her at the counter with flour streaked all the way up both arms, hands buried in a mixing bowl while she works through the dough with the kind of effortless focus that tells me she’s done this so many times her body probably knows the motions better than her brain does. She has her hair up, but pieces are coming loose around her face, and she doesn’t look up immediately when I come through the doorway, which gives me a full two seconds longer than I deserve to look at her before she registers that I’m here.
When she does, her expression does several things in rapid succession that she stops at somewhere in the vicinity of resignation.
“Sin sent you,” she says.
It’s not a question, so I don’t answer it as one.
“There’s a security arrangement.” I move to the end of the counter and rest my forearms on the edge, facing her. “Chapelvoted it in this morning. Ghost has six months of encrypted surveillance traffic, indicating that a threat has been conducting reconnaissance on the mine property. They’re moving to the next phase. Until we understand what that looks like… yeah, you have a detail.”
She presses her lips together. Her hands keep moving in the bowl, kneading with a steadiness that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “A babysitter,” she says.
“A detail.”
“Will… I’ve been coming and going from that mine since I was seven years old. I know that property better than anyone who’s going to be assigned to stand next to me, and I amnotgoing to live my life in a bubble because some encrypted traffic—”
“Millie.”
She stops and looks at me with those hazel eyes that are currently doing the thing where they’re both very calm and very full at the same time. The kitchen is warm with the smell of baking. Somewhere in the next room, the television is murmuring to itself at a volume that suggests Jonas is either very uninterested in the program or not being subtle about eavesdropping on our conversation. There is flour on her left cheekbone, a faint smear she doesn’t know is there.
Fuck! She’s intoxicating.
“I’m not here because Sin told me to be,” I say. “I’m here because I couldn’tnotbe.” The words come out level and without drama because that’s how they’re true. She goes still, not frozen but settled, as though something in her has exhaled. She looks at me for a long moment, her hands still in the bowl, and I hold her gaze because I meant what I said, and I am not going to walk it back.
I reach across the counter and pick up her coffee mug, taking a sip, and set it back in front of her with a small, deliberate click, keeping my eyes on her face.
“I’ll take the sofa,” I say.
In the next room, the television volume increases by a single increment. One notch, precise and unhurried, announcing nothing and communicating everything.
Millie closes her eyes briefly, and the corners of her mouth press together in a complicated shape that she refuses to let become anything else.
Acceptance, and I’ll take that.
I don’t smile.
But I come very close.
Chapter Six
MILLIE
The Next Afternoon
The soup has been simmering for an hour by the time Dad finally admits he’s cold.
He doesn’t say it directly. He never does. He simply reaches for the throw blanket folded over the arm of his chair, a tiny movement I never would have noticed before the diagnosis. Before I started tracking every change in him the same way I used to track the sounds of the mine, listening for stress fractures before they turned dangerous. Before I understood that a man who has spent his whole life refusing to ask for anything communicates need through gesture, through silence, through the way his jaw tightens when something costs him more than he wants anyone to see.
I get up from the sofa and take the blanket from his hands before he can argue and shake it out over his lap myself, tucking the edge behind his thigh the way my grandmother used to do, and I feel his eyes on the top of my head the entire time.
“I had it,” he says.
“I know you did.”
