Iron Daughter

IRON DAUGHTER Chapter 6

The phone kept ringing and Raine kept not answering it, the screen glowing DAD up at her like it was daring her to do something about it, and somewhere in the third ring she realized she'd been holding her breath the whole time without deciding to.

She picked up on the fifth ring, right before it would have gone to voicemail, because some part of her needed it to feel like a choice and not a reflex.

"Hey, Dad."

There was a pause on the other end long enough that she almost said his name again, and when he finally spoke his voice came out rougher than she remembered, like it had aged more than six years' worth since she'd last heard it in person.

"Raine." Just that, at first. Like he needed a second to make sure saying it out loud wasn't going to cost him something. "You picked up."

"Wren told me about your heart."

"Course she did." A short exhale, not quite a laugh. "I told her not to make a thing of it."

"You had an episode. You were in the hospital two nights. That's not nothing, Dad, that's not a thing you get to downplay to me over the phone."

"No," he said, after a moment. "I guess it isn't."

She could hear the clubhouse behind him, the same sounds that had lived in the back of every childhood memory she had, somebody's radio tuned low, the specific clink of bottles being racked behind the bar, a dog's nails on the concrete floor. It should have felt like static. Instead it landed somewhere underneath her ribs, familiar in a way she resented.

"How are you feeling," she asked, because it was easier than any of the other questions sitting in her throat.

"Tired. Old, which I wasn't expecting to feel for another decade at least." A pause. "Better than I was. The doctor's got me on something that's supposed to keep the rhythm steady. Your old man's heart decided to throw a fit, that's all."

"That's not all and you know it."

"No," he admitted again, quieter this time. "It isn't."

"What were you doing, anyway. When it happened."

"Sitting at the bar arguing with Marcus about whether we needed a new ice machine. Middle of a sentence about compressor units, if you can believe that. Woman I've known thirty years told me afterward I went the color of drywall and just kept talking like nothing was wrong, which sounds about right for me, I guess." He let out a breath that had something rueful in it. "Not exactly the way I pictured going out, arguing about ice."

"You're not going out."

"Not today, apparently."

Neither of them said anything for a few seconds. She stood in the bay with her free hand braced against the workbench, watching Gus pretend to coil a hose he'd already coiled twice, giving her a version of privacy that didn't actually require him to leave.

"Cash told me you're coming up," Duke said finally.

"Does he talk to you about everything."

"He talks to me about you. Always has, even when he was pretending real hard not to." Something almost warm came through in that, the first thing all call that sounded like the father she remembered instead of a stranger wearing his voice. "That boy's carried a torch for you so long I'm surprised his hands aren't burnt. Not that it's my business to say so." A beat, like he'd surprised himself by saying it at all. "I wasn't going to ask you to come, Raine. I meant that when I told Marcus not to call you. I didn't think I had the right to ask."

"You still don't, not really." She said it without heat, just fact, laying it down between them like a tool on a bench. "I'm not coming because you asked. I'm coming because you almost died and nobody told me, and I'm not interested in finding out the hard way that I waited too long to fix that."

"Fair enough." A sound that might have been him shifting in a chair, wood creaking under weight. "I don't expect this to undo anything. I know that's not how it works."

"No. It's not."

"I still want to say something to you, though. While I've got you on the phone and you're not standing in front of me where I can see your face deciding whether to believe me or not." He stopped, and she heard him breathe in like he was bracing himself for something heavier than the sentence that came out. "There's a few things about the year you left that I never told you straight. Things I let you believe because the truth made me look worse than the lie did, and I was a coward about it for longer than I'm proud of."

Her stomach did something complicated, dread and hope tangled together so tight she couldn't have separated them if she'd tried.

"What things."

"I want to tell you in person. Not like this, not over a phone line with half the clubhouse close enough to hear me if I raise my voice." His breath caught, just slightly, and she heard a door somewhere behind him, footsteps, a voice she didn't recognize calling his name with the particular urgency of somebody who needed him right now, not later. "I've got to go, Raine. Marcus needs me for something. But I mean it. When you get here, I'm going to tell you the truth about that year, all of it, even the parts that don't make me look like much of a father."

"Dad, wait, what parts, what are you talking about."

"Drive safe," he said, like he hadn't heard her at all, or like hearing her was exactly what he was trying not to do. "I'll see you soon."

The line went dead before she could get another word out, and she stood there in the bay with the phone still pressed to her ear, the dial tone humming against her skin for the second time in less than an hour, and the only thing louder than the silence left behind was the question he'd left hanging in it, unanswered, deliberate, and now impossible to put down.