Page 82 of Thunder

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"She looks good out there." I don't have to turn to know it's Phantom. I felt him coming the way you feel weather change.

"She does," I agree.

He steps up beside me at the bar, a beer in his hand, and for a minute we just watch the room together the way we've watched a hundred rooms, president and sergeant at arms, shoulder to shoulder.

It's the closest we've stood since the day in the yard, and we both know it.

"I owe you somethin'," he says finally, low, his eyes on his daughter and not on me. "And I've been chewin' on how to say it for a month, so bear with me, 'cause I'm no good at this part."

"You don't owe me anything, Harlan."

"Shut up and let me get through it." But there's no heat in it.

He turns the beer in his hand. "I handled it wrong. In the yard. The way I came at you, at her. I've had a month to sit with it and there's no shine I can put on it that makes it right." His jaw works.

"I was out of my mind. And I want you to understand it wasn't about you not bein' good enough for her, because you are, you're the best man I've got and we both know it. It was the secret. It was findin' out the two people I—" He stops.

Starts again. "Findin' out I'd been kept in the dark. Again. In my own family. After what the last secret did to us."

"I know," I tell him. "I knew it in the yard. That's why I didn't swing back."

"Secrets damn near destroyed everything I've got." He's quiet a moment, watching Grace laugh at something across the room.

"Jolene. What I did after. Two years of lyin' to my own kids, watchin' 'em grieve a woman who was in the ground the whole time. I did that. And then I stood in that yard and found out my youngest learned to keep secrets from her own daddy. Some part of me knew right then she learned it from me, and I couldn't stand to look at it." He shakes his head.

"So I did what I do. I got loud and I got mean and I walked off, 'cause I've never once in my life known what to do with a feeling except swing at it."

It's the most words I've ever heard Harlan Lyle string together about his own insides, and I have the sense not to make it a thing.

"She knows you love her," I say. "That was never the question."

"I'm workin' on tellin' her better than I've been." He finally looks at me. "I'm workin' on a lot of things. But I wanted to say it to you first, man to man. I'm sorry for how I came at you. You've been my sword twenty years and you deserved better than gettin' slammed into a shed wall for lovin' somebody."

I put my hand out.

He takes it, and then he pulls me in, one hard clap on the back, the kind of thing that says everything men like us can't.

"We good?" I ask.

"We're good." He steps back, clears his throat, all business again like the last two minutes didn't happen.

"Now. There's somethin' else."

And just like that the temperature of the night changes, because I know that voice.

That's not the voice of a man done talkin' about his feelings.

That's the voice of a president with a problem.

Blaze peels off from the wall across the room like he was waiting for the signal, and he crosses to us, and the easy comes off him with every step.

"Tell him," Phantom says.

Blaze keeps his voice down, under the music, under the laughter. "The Firm moved again. Yesterday."

Everything in me goes still and cold. "Moved how?"