I feel it.
Not fear.
Recognition.
The kind that settles heavy, like something sliding into place that I didn’t want to name. My hand finds the edge of the table beside me, fingers pressing into the surface hard enough that I feel the grain through my skin, and I focus on that. The texture, the pressure, something real. Something now.
Because if they are still out there…
If they have been watching…
If they are rebuilding…
Then this wasnever over.
The words settle into me slowly.
My father built the mine after my mother died. He poured himself into the ground and built something out of grief, love, and a stubbornness that didn’t know where else to put all the space her absence left behind. It has been his for fourteen years. The dust of it is in his lungs, the record of it is in his hands, the whole history of our family since she died is mapped along its shafts, ridgelines, and in the faces of the men who have worked it for him since before I was old enough to carry my own hard hat.
They looked at all of that and saw a financial base.
“They won’t get it,” I say.
Victoria’s expression shifts into something that is not quite a smile but is close to one. “No,” she says, simply. “They won’t.”
Across the room, Marley has dissolved into laughter about something Ro said. Queenie is watching the room with those bright, certain eyes. The clubhouse continues in its usual warmth, as if the conversation I just had belongs to a completely different world from the one where Ro pours non-regulation coffee, and Victoria catalogs the indignities of the second trimester.
Maybe it does.
Maybe that’s the point.
The ordinary warmth of this place. The thing they’re all protecting underneath the noise, the violence, the reputation. This habit of carrying burdens together without turning it into a performance.
My father at the kitchen table drifts back into my mind.
Then the unopened documents sitting in my bag.
The diagnosis, the mine, everything he built, and all the things he’s apparently been doing for longer than I realized to make sure it survives him.
Victoria tops up my coffee without asking. “You’re doing well,” she says with the kind of understanding that tells me she’s survived her own version of this nightmare before. “Just so you know.”
I wrap both hands around the mug and let the warmth seep into my palms. “I’m faking a substantial portion of it,” I admit.
“Everyone is,” she says. “The trick is to keep showing up while you’re doing it.”
***
That night, back at home, I sit on the porch.
March darkness settles over the yard, the distant city glow tracing its edges beyond the hills. The air smells of desert, andfaintly, from inside, the remnants of a dinner I didn’t quite manage to finish.
Through the front window, I can see Will. He’s in the armchair, the one my father has apparently surrendered for the night with that grand, generous air that says he’s done you a huge favor and you’d better appreciate it. He’s reading something with one ankle kicked over his knee, completely relaxed in that unfair way he has of making every space feel like it belongs to him the second he walks into it.
The lamp beside him throws warm light across the sharp line of his jaw.
I watch him for longer than I intend to.
Through the kitchen window, I can see my father. Dad is at the table with a glass of water, studying the woodgrain like it’s suddenly riveting, wearing the look of someone who has no intention of going to bed at a reasonable hour and wants that understood as a deliberate, fully informed choice.
