Page 85 of Collateral Damage
He looks at her with a level of respect that makes my throat tight. He’s treating her as if she’s the most important person in the building, not an elderly woman with a failing memory.
"I look after people," he says. “Sometimes I get hurt doing it.”
My mother’s gaze drifts to the frost on the glass, her thumb tracing the edge of her wool blanket. Then, with a sudden, lucid sharpness, she looks back at him.
"Are you looking after her?"
"Yes," Silas says.
There’s no hesitation. No "I'm trying" or "It's my job."
She studies him for a long, silent moment. I can almost see the gears turning, her internal compass measuring the weight of his word. Silas doesn't blink. He sits there, broken and pinned together, offering himself up for her judgment.
Finally, she gives a small, decisive nod. "Good," she says, her voice softening. "She’s an awkward child, so very shy, but she’s a good girl."
I look down at my lap, the sting in my eyes turning into a hot, silent tear I refuse to let fall.
"Yes," Silas says. His voice is barely a whisper, but it’s the steadiest thing in the room. "She is."
I look up, and for a second, Silas isn't looking at my mother. He’s looking at me across the small gap between the chairs. He isn't just humoring a sick woman.
My mother reaches out a trembling hand, and Silas catches it with his left, his large, scarred fingers enveloping hers with a tenderness that shatters the last of my composure completely.
“Is she coming soon? You tell her she needs to be home before the streetlights come on," she says, her voice pitched with that sharp, motherly fretfulness I haven’t heard in twenty years. "She didn't take her sweater, and the radio says it’s going to drop tonight. She’s so forgetful, that girl."
She’s looking right at my face, but her eyes are tracking a bird outside the window, searching for a version of me that—in her head—is still a girl who hasn't arrived yet.
The room is a graveyard of things she doesn't recognize: the framed photos of us at the lake, the sweater I bought her last Christmas, the hand lotion that smells like our garden. I’m just a polite stranger sitting in a plastic-covered chair, a nameless visitor she’s waiting for to leave so the real Ava can walk through the door.
A tear tracks a hot, stinging path down my cheek. I don’t wipe it away. I don't try to correct her or force her back to a "now" that no longer exists for her. I just let the salt burn, finally admitting how much it hurts to be in a room filled with my own childhood pictures.
He doesn't look at me with pity. He turns toward my mother and inclines his head in a sharp, respectful nod—a soldier reporting to a superior officer.
"I’ll make sure you and your daughter have everything you need, ma'am," he says.
The ma'am rings out in the sterile room like a bell. He isn't talking down to her. He’s looking her right in the eye and giving her the one thing the disease can't steal: her dignity.
"That’s a promise," he adds. His voice is a low, vibrating frequency that seems to steady the floor beneath my feet.
Mom gives a slow, dignified nod. She reaches out, her paper-thin fingers hovering near his sleeve, and she smiles. "He has kind eyes, Ava. You stay close to him."
"I know," I whisper, my eyes fixed on the man who just promised to protect us both. "I don’t plan on letting go."
Silas
The altitude doesn't help the throb in my shoulder. Every time the Pilatus hits a pocket of air, the reconstruction plate feels like it’s trying to vibrate out of the bone, a sickening, metallic grind that makes my vision spot. I keep my breathing shallow, my jaw clamped tight enough to crack a tooth, and my face neutral.
Across the aisle, Ava is staring out the window. She took the seat without being asked, her head angled toward the glass as the Eastern Seaboard gave way to the flat, frozen geometry of the Midwest.
Exhaustion overtakes me, and when I see Ava’s seat recline and her eyes shut, I follow suit.
Three hours later, groggy and heavy-limbed, I wake to the seatbelt chime as the descent begins. The prairie opens up below us, a vast, white desert of North Dakota winter. From this height, Jericho looks exactly like what it’s supposed to look like—a working ranch, unremarkable, swallowed by the tree canopy my father insisted on when they broke ground. Forty-five acres of reserve and open land, invisible to the casual observer.
Which is entirely the point.
We touch down smoothly on the private strip. When the door opens, the cold hits like a physical wall—a dry, brutal North Dakota February that makes the Baltimore winter look like a spring day.
"How much land?" she says, pulling her coat tighter.
