“Really… thank you,” I say again.
He nods once more, and we walk up the path together, gravel crunching underfoot. Through the kitchen window, I see Dad’s silhouette move past, carrying something, probably his evening glass of water, and the sight of him upright and moving and entirely ordinary loosens something in my muscles that I hadn’t realized was braced.
“There’s soup on the stove,” he says. “Made too much.”
I cross the room and press a kiss to the top of his head and breathe him in, cedar, coffee, and something that is undeniablyhim, and I stay there one beat longer than is strictly necessary. “Thanks, Dad.”
He pats my hand. He doesn’t ask. He has never been a man who interrogates.
Will ladles the soup into bowls without being asked.
We eat at the kitchen table while the house settles into the same nighttime routine it’s fallen into over the last week. Dad’s chair creaks from the living room. The lamp clicks off at exactly nine, same as always. A few minutes later, light appears beneath his bedroom door, telling me he’s in there reading again, trying to wear himself out enough to sleep and probably failing at it.
The mine documents are already spread across half of the table. I’ve been living with them every evening now, pulling them out after dinner and working through them section by section because the alternative is letting the full weight of it land on me all at once, and I have learned over a lifetime of managing difficult things that the only way through a mountain is to take it one small step at a time.
I open my laptop and pull up the spreadsheet I was buried in last night, extraction records from the last fiscal year staring back at me in neat little rows of numbers. Then I drop back into the work the same way you sink into an old bruise you’ve stopped expecting to heal properly.
Will grabs a beer and sits back down across from me. He doesn’t offer to help. He’s learned I don’t want help with the numbers, not because I can’t use it, but because the act of working through them myself is part of how I’m learning to hold this thing. The mine is mine now, or it will be, and the weight of that is something I need to carry with my own hands for a while before I let anyone else near it. He seems to understand this without me having to explain it, which is something I keep noticing about him and choosing not to think about too hard at night.
He reads.
I calculate.
The sounds of the house settle around us, old wood creaking now and then while the night drifts slowly forward.
At some point, I hear my father’s bedroom light click off. I glance at the sliver beneath his door and find it dark, and something in me eases further.
Time moves strangely when you’re doing numbers. You look up and forty minutes have dissolved into the accounting. The soup bowls are long since cleared, the kitchen has gone very still, and the house has settled into that deep silence of the small hours, all its sounds slowing, deepening, and retreating to the corners.
I look up at the clock…
Two in the morning.
I set my pen down on the table, very deliberately, and stare at the column of figures I’ve been working through for the last hour without seeing them anymore.
Will is still here.
He’s halfway through his second paperback, his beer’s been empty for who knows how long, and now and then I catch him looking over at me with that steady attention that says he’s got absolutely nowhere else he’d rather be right now.
“Why are you still up?” I ask.
He considers the question for approximately half a second. “Same reason you are.”
I look at him across the table. His face in the kitchen lamp’s light is calm and a little tired and completely present, and there’s something about the ordinariness of him sitting there, at two in the morning, in my father’s house, that makes my chest do something complicated.
“Will.” I fold my hands around my pen, looking at it rather than at him for a moment. “What was Dad like when the club first met him?”
He is quiet for long enough that I look up.
His expression has shifted, turned slightly inward, the way it gets when he’s reaching for something. “Careful,” he says, and the echo of it makes the corner of my mouth lift before I can stop it. “Smart. The kind of man who measures out everything before he says it, who doesn’t put a word down unless he means it to stay there.” He pauses, and something moves across his face that I recognize as genuine warmth, the kind he doesn’t perform. “Reminded me of my dad, actually.”
Something warm settles in me at that.
“My dad likes Bear,” I say.
“My dad likes Jonas.” Will’s voice is certain. “From early on… that’s not nothing. Dad doesn’t decide quickly, and he doesn’t change his mind easily, and he liked Jonas from about the third conversation.” He tilts his head slightly. “I think Dad recognized something. Two men who built things slowly and meant them to last.”
I sit with that for a moment.
