Page 82 of Collateral Damage
"You should have taken the wheelchair," he says. His voice is a gravelly wreck, stripped thin by the intubation tube and exhaustion.
"Probably," I admit.
He looks better than he did on the mountain, but worse than I’d like to see. The color is returning to his face, but it’s a slow, grueling process. There are ugly bruises covering his face, and his right shoulder and arm are a mountain of gauze and padding beneath the starched hospital gown.
I know the contents of his surgical report. I pulled the chart the moment I could limp to a terminal, and nobody dared to tell me I shouldn't. Clean repair. Substantial soft tissue trauma. Good prognosis with diligent physical therapy. Full function is probable, but not guaranteed.
"Probable" is a word doctors use when they're hedging their bets. I’ve been sitting with that uncertainty since I read the notes.
"You'll need physio," I say, my voice retreating into the safety of the clinical. "Committed physio. Not the kind where you decide you're fine after three sessions and stop going because you have a 'mission'."
A flicker of anxiety moves across his face. "Is that a professional assessment?"
"It's a warning."
Outside the door, the Recovery Wing moves through its midnight rhythms. The muffled cadence of footsteps, a supply cart wheeling past, the steady, rhythmic pulse of a monitor in the next room. In here, it’s just the two of us and the suffocating silence of everything we haven't said yet.
"Ava."
"Don't," I say quietly, looking away.
"I haven't said anything."
"I know what you're going to say. You're going to tell me this changes nothing. That you're a danger to me. That I should go back to my 'normal' life."
"No," he says. "I'm not."
I look up, surprised. He holds my gaze the way he holds everything—steadily, without flinching, even now when he’s anchored to a bed by tubes and pins.
“I risked your life taking you to that cabin,” he says.
I frown at him. “You saved my life by taking me there. Reagan was already in my house, Silas. If you hadn't come for me, who knows what he would have done.”
He shakes his head, a grim, pained motion. “I should have listened to Caleb. He warned me I was too close to this.” He swallows, his throat working thickly. “To you.”
I pause, silently praying for the right words. “I’m not going to pretend to understand what leadership has cost you, but I can say that your team trusts you for good reason. As do I.” When he looks set to argue, I shake my head. “You aren’t perfect, Silas. No one is. So stop trying to be.”
The faintest twitch touches his mouth—not a smile, but a concession. I take it as a small victory.
“You told me I was putting myself in the place of God,” he says.
“I did.”
His gaze drifts past me, toward the dark, frosted line of the trees visible through the window. “I don't get the luxury of a second guess. In my world, being wrong is a funeral service.”
I’ve treated enough trauma to recognize the structural damage in a human soul. Silas hides the cracks better than most, but they’re there—deep, and poorly cauterized.
“Who was she?” I say quietly.
The look that crosses his face is so raw it steals the air from the room. Every instinct I have screams at me to reach for him, but he isn't looking for comfort. He’s looking for release.
“It was a rescue mission in the Cascades,” he says after a silence that stretches too thin. “A light plane went down in the high country. The intel was a mess—just that there was a lone survivor, high-value, and we had to extract her.”
He exhales, a slow, controlled release of pressure. “We found her two days after the crash. Huddled in the wreckage. Wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t let anyone near her.”
“What happened?”
“I split my team. Sent the bulk of my unit to sweep the perimeter with Caleb as lead scout.” His eyes close, and for a second, I think he won’t go on. “I knew better. You don’t isolate in hostile terrain. You don’t reduce your perimeter.” He swallows. “I did it anyway. I thought I was controlling the risk.”
