PARKER
The hospital in Mooresville smells like antiseptic and despair, a combination I’ve become intimately familiar with over the past four days. Four days of watching monitors, counting heartbeats, and measuring breaths. Four days of waiting for Silas to open his eyes.
Four days of wondering if he ever will.
The room is dim, just the soft glow of medical equipment and the city lights filtering through the window. It’s late—past midnight, edging into that dead zone where the world feels suspended between one day and the next.
On the couch against the far wall, my boys are asleep. Liam tucked against Jace’s chest, his serious little face finally relaxed in sleep, one hand clutching Jace’s shirt like he’s afraid to let go. Noah curled up in Cal’s lap, his lighter hair a mess against Cal’s shoulder, mouth slightly open in that way that makes him look younger than five.
Jace and Cal are awake, though barely. Cal’s eyes are half-closed, his hand resting on Noah’s back in a protective gesturethat’s become automatic over the past few days. Jace is staring at nothing, that thousand-yard stare he gets when his mind is running tactical scenarios he can’t control.
Neither of them has left this room except to shower and change. Neither of them will until Silas wakes up.
Ifhe wakes up.
No. When. When he wakes up.
I can’t let myself think the alternative.
Charles and Sienna have been here too, rotating shifts, bringing food no one eats and coffee that goes cold. Marcus and the team leads stopped by this morning to pay respects like Silas is already dead, and I wanted to scream at them to get out, to take their grief somewhere else because he’s not gone, he’s not, he’s right here?—
But I didn’t scream. Just nodded and accepted their condolences like a widow at a wake.
The transfer from Asheville to the jet was a blur. I rode with him, held his hand while the medics worked, watched his chest rise and fall with mechanical precision because the ventilator was doing the breathing for him. Watched them pump blood and fluids and God knows what else into his veins, trying to keep him alive.
Two gunshot wounds. One to the upper right chest that miraculously missed his lung by centimeters. One to the lower left that did less damage than it should have, but still tore through muscle and nicked his spleen.
Blood loss. Trauma. Shock.
The doctors said he was lucky.
Lucky.
I wanted to ask them what the fuck they thought luck looked like, because this—Silas unconscious and broken, hooked up to machines that beep and whir and keep him tethered to life—this doesn’t feel lucky.
This feels like punishment.
The boys wanted to see him immediately when Charles brought them this morning. Begged, actually, with that desperate five-year-old logic that says if they can just see Uncle Silas, if they can just talk to him, he’ll be okay.
I didn’t have the strength to tell them no. Didn’t have the strength to send them back to the house with Charles and Sienna, where they’d be comfortable and safe and not sitting in a hospital room watching someone they love fight for his life.
They wouldn’t have gone anyway.
They love him. It’s that simple and that complicated. They’ve known him for barely two months, but Silas has become essential to them in the way that only children can make someone essential—completely, absolutely, without reservation.
Liam asked if Uncle Silas was going to die. Asked it with that serious face he makes when he’s trying to be brave, trying to be the big brother even though he’s only older by seven minutes.
I told him no. Told him Uncle Silas is strong, that he’s fought through worse, that he’s going to wake up and be fine.
I don’t know if I believe it.
Noah wanted to know if it was his fault. If maybe Uncle Silas got hurt because of something he did, some cosmic five-year-old transgression that resulted in this.
I held him while he cried. Told himno, baby, no, this isn’t your fault, none of this is your fault.
But it’s mine.
I’m the one who insisted we go after him. I’m the one who couldn’t just let him go, couldn’t accept his sacrifice, couldn’t be practical and protect what we had instead of risking everything for one man.
