Page 47 of Deacon

He nodded, accepting exactly what I gave him. Nothing more. Nothing less.

I made myself turn away.

The short walk to the door felt ridiculous after everything I had survived without him, yet every step carried the awareness of his eyes following me. I refused to look back before leaving the room.

The hallway hit me with fluorescent brightness and the familiar sterile chill of recycled hospital air. I stopped beside the wall and tightened my hand around the strap of my bag until my fingers hurt.

Jackson was awake.

The fact should have felt clean.

Triumphant, even.

Instead, my body couldn’t decide whether to shake from relief or run from everything his open eyes had dragged back into my life.

For almost seventeen years, I had lived with questions because questions were all he left me.

Had he loved me?

Had he used me?

Had the lake meant anything to him beyond one night and a girl who had finally offered what he already knew she wanted to give?

For years, I hadn’t even known whether he was alive. I had imagined accidents, prison cells, another country, another woman. Eventually, I stopped searching for explanations because every version ended in the same place.

Jackson had never come back.

I built a life anyway.

I raised Jade. I became a nurse and learned how to hold other people together while their worlds split open. I learned how to make dinner after twelve-hour shifts, how to sit through parent-teacher conferences alone, and how to answer my daughter’s questions without letting her see how many of my own remained unanswered.

I became someone without him.

Now Jackson was awake, and none of the questions had disappeared.

They had simply opened their eyes.

I pushed away from the wall and started walking before someone noticed me standing there unraveling in slow motion. One foot in front of the other. I knew how to do that. Survival rarely required elegance.

Behind me, Jackson Hayes was breathing on his own and discovering the shape of a life that had continued without him.

Ahead of me waited Jade, the truth about her father, and every decision I had been able to postpone while Jackson lay unconscious.

His waking changed everything.

It also changed nothing.

The anger still existed. So did the years. So did the girl I had once been, buried beneath a woman who knew much better now.

But hearing him say my name had reached straight through all of it.

For one terrible, perfect second, I had been eighteen again.

That was what frightened me most.

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Deacon