Page 15 of Monk

My father was awake.

David Wilcox lay propped against a stack of pillows, his face pale and drawn, his hair grayer than I remembered. The fluorescent lights carved harsh shadows into his features, deepening the lines around his mouth and eyes. He looked smaller than he should have, diminished by the thin hospitalgown and the tangle of wires connecting him to machines that beeped and hummed with indifferent precision. An IV bag hung beside the bed, feeding clear fluid into his arm through a thin tube. The whole room smelled of antiseptic and that peculiar sterile odor hospitals wore like a second skin.

But his eyes—those sharp, assessing eyes that had always seen straight through me, that had never missed a detail or let a lie slide by—were wide with shock. They locked onto mine the instant I stepped through the doorway, and in them I saw something I had never seen before: genuine surprise, and maybe the first spark of anger.

“Lina?”

His voice cracked on my name, rough and disbelieving, like he thought I might be a hallucination. A trick of the medication, or the pain, or the exhaustion. Like his mind was playing games with him after hours of lying in that sterile hospital bed, staring at the fluorescent lights overhead.

“Hi, Dad.” My voice came out quieter than I intended. Shakier. I could hear the tremor in it, the uncertainty I had tried so hard to bury during the entire drive there.

He blinked once, then again, like he was trying to make sense of the fact that I was real—that I was standing in front of him and not some ghost his exhausted mind had conjured. His eyes, still sharp despite everything, tracked over my face as if searching for proof that I was flesh and blood and not a fever dream.

“What—” He stopped, then cleared his throat, wincing at the effort. “What are you doing here?”

I moved closer, my hands twisting together in front of me, my fingers knotting and unknotting in that nervous habit I had never quite managed to break. “Mrs. Patterson called. She told me you’d fallen. That you were in the hospital.” I hesitated, then added, “She sounded worried.”

His expression shifted immediately, confusion giving way to irritation. His jaw tightened, his mouth flattening into a thin, familiar line—the look I’d seen a thousand times before.

“Damn it,” he muttered, his voice rough with frustration. “I told her not to call you.”

His words hit like a slap across the face, sharp and stinging.

I stopped a few feet from the bed, frozen in place, my chest tightening until it hurt. My throat closed like invisible hands had wrapped around it and squeezed. The air in the room suddenly felt thick enough to drown in.

He didn’t want me here.

He specifically told Mrs. Patterson not to call me, not to drag me back into his life, not to involve me in whatever was happening with his health. He had made it clear—crystal clear—that I was the last person he wanted to see.

Because he still hadn’t forgiven me. He knew I’d left without saying goodbye. Knew I’d disappeared into the night like a coward. Knew I’d cut ties and run as far and as fast as I could, never once looking back. And he didn’t want me here now, standing at his bedside as if I had any right to be worried.

“Dad.”

“Where the hell have you been, Carolina?”

His voice was sharp now. Angry. The shock had worn off, replaced by something harder, something that had clearly been building for seven years. I could see it in the tension of his jaw, the way his shoulders were rigid, the fire burning behind his eyes.

“You just”—he gestured vaguely, his hand shaking with the effort—“left. No phone call. No letter. No explanation. No warning. Nothing. One day you were here, and the next you weregone, and I had no idea—” His voice cracked, the anger fraying at the edges into something rawer. “I had no idea if you were alive or dead. If you were safe. If something had happened to you. Ifyou’d been hurt, or taken, or—” He stopped himself and pressed his lips together as if holding the rest of it in by force. “Do you have any idea what that was like? Wondering every single day formonthsif I would ever see my daughter again?”

Guilt crashed over me like a wave, cold and suffocating. It filled my lungs and made it hard to breathe. I wanted to look away from him, to escape the weight of his gaze, but I forced myself to hold it. I owed him that much, at least.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Sorry?” He let out a bitter laugh, shaking his head. “You’resorry? Lina, I spentmonthstrying to find you. I called everyone I could think of. I filed a missing person report. I thought—” He stopped, his jaw working, his eyes bright with something that looked dangerously close to tears. “I thought you were dead.”

“I couldn’t—” My voice broke. “I couldn’t stay.”

“Why not?” he demanded. “What happened? What could possibly have been so bad that you had to disappear without a word? That you couldn’t even pick up the damn phone and tell me you were okay?”

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

How was I supposed to explain that I’d fallen in love with a man I barely knew—a man who rode with an MC everyone in town spoke about in lowered voices, a man who had made me feel alive and seen and wanted for the first time since Mom died—and then believed I’d watched him vanish in a massacre that left bodies strewn across the ground like garbage? How was I supposed to explain that kind of loss to someone who would never understand why I’d been drawn to that world in the first place?

How was I supposed to tell him that I was pregnant and terrified and utterly convinced that staying in Lawton would put my baby in mortal danger—from people who might come looking for revenge, or answers, or blood? That I ran because Ididn’t know what else to do, because every instinct I had told me my child’s life depended on disappearing completely? That I’d been a stupidly naive twenty-three-year-old girl, drowning in grief and fear and making impossible choices with no good way through them?

“There was—” I swallowed hard, my throat constricting painfully. “There was someone. He died. In the Diamondback Massacre. Seven years ago.”

My father’s expression shifted, confusion flickering across his weathered face before something darker settled in. “The clubhouse shooting?”