Page 32 of Monk

“Why didn’t you tell me?” The words came out sharper than I intended.

“How could I tell you, if I didn’t know where you were?”

He met my gaze then, and I saw the exhaustion there. The weight of years of struggling alone. “There’s a developer,” he said quietly. “Wants to buy the land. Build a casino.”

His words hit me like a physical blow. “A casino?” I stood abruptly, my hands clenching into fists. “You’re joking.”

“I wish I were.”

“Dad, that farm—it’s been in our family since?—”

“I know.”

“Great-grandpa Wilcox built that barn with his own hands. Mom used to—” My voice cracked, and I had to stop, had to drag in a breath. “You can’t sell it.”

“I don’t want to sell it.” His voice was firm now, edged with frustration. “You think I want to? You think I want to watch some corporation bulldoze everything your mother and I built? Everything my father built?”

“Then don’t.”

“It’s not that simple, Lina. We don’t have the clients we used to. We don’t have the capital. The property taxes alone—” He stopped and rubbed a hand over his face. “Eric doesn’t want tosell either. But he’s overseas. And I’m one man. One old man who can’t even stay on a horse anymore.”

The bitterness in his voice cut through me. I wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him we’d figure it out, that there had to be another way. But the truth was, I didn’t know. I had been gone for seven years. I didn’t know the state of the farm’s finances, didn’t know how bad things had gotten.

I had run away, and while I was building a life in California, my father had been here carrying the whole thing alone. “We’ll figure something out,” I said, even though I had no idea what that something could be. “We’re not selling. Not to some developer who wants to turn our family legacy into acasino.”

He looked at me, and for the first time since I arrived, I saw hope flicker in his eyes. “Okay,” he breathed. “Okay.”

I nodded, swallowing past the lump in my throat. “Let’s just get you home. We’ll deal with the rest later.”

“Later,” he agreed.

I moved back behind his wheelchair, gripping the handles, and pushed him toward the door. My mind was spinning, racing through possibilities, through options I didn’t have, through solutions that felt impossibly out of reach.

The farm.

God, the farm—with its sprawling pastures, the old red barn, the house where I grew up. The place where my mother taught me to bake pies in the kitchen. Where my father taught me to ride when I was five. Where I once brought John on a Sunday afternoon while my father was in town.Don’t think about him.I shoved the memory down and focused instead on guiding the wheelchair through the doorway and into the hall.

The hospital corridor stretched ahead of us, long, sterile, and fluorescent-lit. A nurse passed by, offering a polite smile. An elderly couple shuffled past, the woman clutching her husband’s arm.

Normal. Everything was normal, and then I saw him.

Standing in the middle of the hallway, maybe twenty feet away. Tall—well over six feet—the way he had always towered over everyone else. Broad-shouldered, with the same athletic build carved by hours in the gym and years of discipline. Dark hair longer than I remembered, falling just past his collar in waves that looked like he’d been dragging his hands through them all day. Tattoos curled across his forearms, intricate black ink I had once traced with my fingertips before it disappeared beneath the sleeves of his black T-shirt. His shirt fit closely enough to show he was still in brutal shape, still carrying himself with that hard, dangerous control. And his eyes—those eyes. Dark, almost black in the hospital light. Intense in the old, ruinous way that used to make me feel like I was the only person in the room, the only person in the world. They fixed on me with a focus so sharp it made the floor tilt beneath my feet.

My heart stopped—skipped, stalled, forgot its own rhythm—because it couldn’t be. Itcouldn’tbe. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be dead. John was dead. I had seen the news reports, heard the body count, stood outside that clubhouse and watched them wheel out the dead. He was gone.

He had been gone for seven years.

But he was standing right there.Alive.

The wheelchair stopped moving. I didn’t remember stopping, didn’t remember my hands locking on the handles, but suddenly we were motionless in the middle of the hallway, and he was staring at me. The air between us felt charged, electric, like the instant before lightning split the sky.

He looked different. Older. Harder. There were lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there before, a tightness in his jaw that spoke of years I knew nothing about. His cut—the leather vest stamped with the Diamondback patch—sat across his shoulders like armor. But his eyes. God, his eyes were exactly the same:dark, deep, and fixed on me like I was still the center of his ruined world.

My lungs forgot how to work. My brain forgot how to form thoughts. My heart hammered so violently against my ribs I thought it might crack them open. All I could do was stand there, rooted in place, gripping the wheelchair handles so hard my knuckles blanched, and stare at the ghost of the man I loved—the man I had mourned for seven long years, cried over through more nights than I could count, the man who had once been my whole world.

He’s alive.The thought crashed through me like black water, drowning everything else. Every memory, every tear, every sleepless night spent clutching his old shirt to my chest—suddenly all of it felt like a cruel joke someone had let run too long. My vision blurred at the edges, and I couldn’t tell whether it was shock or the tears already burning in my eyes.

He’s alive, and he’s here, and he’s looking at me like—“Hey, Monk.” My father’s voice shattered the moment. I blinked, my gaze jerking down to where he sat in the wheelchair, a knowing smirk on his weathered face. “What are you doing here?” he asked, his tone casual and friendly, like this was the most ordinary thing in the world. Like the man standing in front of us wasn’t supposed to bedead.