The recording runs a few seconds longer after she stops speaking—just breathing. Just the mechanical confirmation that time is still passing, whether we’re ready for it or not.
Then the recording cuts.
The silence that follows feels violent.
I sit here with my back against the wall, hands hanging uselessly between my knees, and try to understand how something can feel like both an injury and a lifeline at the same time.
Her love lands in me like a responsibility.
Like a promise I didn’t know I was waiting for.
Like something I will burn down cities to get back to.
I stay here longer than I mean to.
Not thinking.
Not moving.
Just holding the sound of her voice like it’s the onlyrealthing left.
The room is completely silent.
I don’t move.
I’m not sure how much time passes. It might be thirty seconds, it might be longer. Diane doesn’t shift in her chair. She doesn’t say anything, and I find myself abruptly, profoundly grateful that she knows when silence is not something to fill.
Eventually, Dad’s hand comes down on my shoulder.
That’s all.
His palm, heavy and steady, settled onto my shoulder the way it has since I was a kid, the way it did at my mother’s funeral and the night I got my first stripe and every other moment in my life when the ground needed to feel solid again.
He doesn’t squeeze.
He doesn’t speak.
He simply lets me know he’s here.
I breathe in. Millie’s voice is still living somewhere in my chest, my hand resting flat against the floor, and I am more certain than I have ever been of a single fact in my twenty-one years on this earth.
She loves me.
She told her father, with no one listening, that she loves me. She used the word out loud for the first time, and she used it to him, which means she meant it more than she’s ever meant anything else she’s said.
Two years!
Two years of carefully maintaining distance, of choosing the club’s arrangement with Jonas over every instinct I had, of turning away from something that was right there because the timing never allowed for it.
I push myself upright and plant both palms against the concrete wall, letting the cold bleed through my skin until the world feels like it has edges again. “Thank you,” I tell her. The steadiness in my voice catches me off guard.
Diane inclines her head, professional as ever, her expression composed but not impersonal. “Don’t thank me yet. There’s more.”
Something in the way she says it tightens my spine. “What kind of more?” I ask.
“The kind that explains why you’re here in the first place.”
She opens the folder in front of her with deliberate care, sliding a document across the table but keeping one hand on the edge of it like she’s not ready for me to look at it just yet.
