Page 17 of Collateral Damage
“Relax, Doc. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
Silas scribbles again.
I keep my eyes fixed on him as I answer. “This number is no longer available to you.”
Silas points at the end call button, and I move a second too late.
“Your mom looks a little thin, Doc. Sure they’re feeding her enough at Greenfield?”
I don’t understand the words at first.
They hit in fragments—your mom, looks thin, Greenfield—and my mind refuses to assemble them into a sentence. If I let them lock together, something inside me is going to give way, and I can’t afford that. Not here. Not now.
My breath stalls halfway in. My chest locks, like a machine that’s seized. I recognize the sensation instantly—acute shock response. The moment before pain registers. The moment before a patient realizes the damage is real.
He isn’t watching me anymore.
He’s watching my mother.
The woman who doesn’t know my name most days. Who can’t follow a conversation long enough to sense danger. Who smiles at strangers because her brain tells her kindness is safer than resistance.
A sound scrapes out of my throat before I can stop it. Not a scream. Something smaller. Broken. My hands curl into fists in my lap, nails biting into my palms hard enough to ground me.
He’s crossed out of my life and into hers—into the last space I believed was protected. Controlled. Off-limits. Greenfield was supposed to be sterile. Safe. Locked down. A place where harm couldn’t follow her because memory itself had already taken so much.
My stomach turns violently. Heat rushes up my neck, my vision narrowing until the edges blur. I can’t get enough air. I know exactly what’s happening to my body, and that knowledge does nothing to stop it.
Before I can breathe again, Silas takes the phone from my shaking hand and cuts the call. The silence that follows is deafening, filled only by the ragged, uneven sound of my own lungs trying to remember how to work.
“Ava,” he says softly.
I don’t look at him. I can’t. I keep my eyes locked on the windshield, watching the world blur. If I move even a fraction of an inch, I’ll lose the last of my control.
“It’s a trap. He’s baiting you.”
Hearing him say it out loud doesn’t lessen the pain; it just carves it deeper. “I can’t leave her,” I whisper, the words breaking apart in my throat. “What if he?—”
Silas’s posture shifts, his shoulders turning rigid, his profile hardening into something forged from ice. “I won’t let that happen. As soon as we get to Frederick, I’ll set up a security detail. She’ll be covered until he’s found.”
I don’t respond. I can’t find the words through the static in my head. As if sensing the need, Silas reaches across the console. His hand is massive, warm, and solid as it closes over mine. My fingers, pale and trembling, disappear beneath the weight of his.
I focus on that pressure—the heat of his skin against my cold knuckles. Slowly, the car begins to move. The low vibration of the engine hums through the seat, and the rhythmic sound of the tires on the asphalt starts to pull me back from the ledge. I take a ragged breath, then another, letting the oxygen dampen the panic in my chest.
The fear doesn't leave. It’s still there, a dark coil in the pit of my stomach. But as Silas removes his hand to take the wheel, I realize I’m out of room to carry it. My hands are too small for this much grief.
I take the terror, the "what-ifs," and the image of Reagan alone with my mother, and trust God to hold what I can no longer.
Silas
Ava disappears into the restroom of the grocery stop, her shoulders locked and her movements too precise—she’s navigating the world on a fraying thread of discipline. She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t have the spare bandwidth for a glance.
That brittle composure worries me more than a breakdown would.
The moment the door clicks shut, I’m in motion.
I step out into the biting air, back to the brick wall, eyes raking the lot by reflex as I pull my phone free. Overhead, the yellow sodium lights hum with a sickly, electric drone. A delivery truck idles at the far end of the asphalt, its exhaust huffing thick white plumes into the air. Everything looks exactly as it should—the kind of normalcy that usually hides hazards.
Caleb answers on the second ring.
