"You better go, and you better not come back until the job is done," the country singer's father ordered her from his hospital bed.
Lainey Wilson knows the difference between love and brutal love — and she also knows how to deal with the punches.
Last July, while filming season 5 of Paramount's smash drama Yellowstone as the musician Abby, the "Heart Like a Truck" singer, 31, was frightened when her father, Brian,
was hospitalized after suffering from an infection and having a stroke. He needed nine surgeries total, including the loss of his left eye.
"It was really, really bad," Wilson says in this week's edition of PEOPLE, which hits newsstands on Friday. "Every doctor had told us, 'This is not looking good.
I remember they had recruited a few hundred extras for the shoot, and I was scheduled to be there the next day, but I was in Houston with my father, and I simply didn't want to go."
Wilson, the cover star of StyleWatch's Summer Edition, discussed the problem over a phone call in his hospital bed when she thought her father was sleeping. She quickly discovered he was listening in.
"He opened his eyes and asked, 'Did I hear you're not going to Yellowstone?'" 'Daddy, I can't leave you,' I said. "He told me, 'You better go, and you better not come back until the job is done,'" she recalls. "That's the girl he raised." So I went there and did it.