Page 6 of Deacon

What would I have told her if he had died tonight?

The question slid beneath my skin. Nothing I could have said would have been good enough or made sense of why the father she had never met died a few floors above me without ever knowing she existed.

I stepped into the hallway because the waiting room had become too crowded and warm, filled with breath that didn’t belong to me. Late-night stillness washed over the hospital corridor in patches. The building was never fully quiet, yet the noise had muted enough for me to hear the distant wheels of a linen cart and the faint electrical buzz overhead.

I walked until I found an empty stretch of wall, then stopped with my arms folded tightly across my middle.

I didn’t cry. Partly because I was too old and tired for the kind of collapse that somehow left a woman looking prettier afterward. Mostly because the grief inside me wasn’t fresh enough for tears to know what to do with it. It had lived there too long and changed shape too many times. Heartbreak had hardened into anger, pride, and finally the dull ache of building a life around an absence and calling it healing because I had no better word.

Seeing him tonight had torn straight through all of it. It hadn’t fixed anything or answered a single question. It had only ripped open what I had spent years learning to live around.

I rested my head against the wall and closed my eyes.

Jackson.

Even inside my own mind, I couldn’t make him anyone else yet.

I saw him as he had looked in trauma, blood across his mouth and his skin drained pale. Behind that image came the memory of his smile at eighteen, slow and dangerous and finally honest when he caught me staring at him in our driveway.

The same mouth. The same man.

A lifetime now sat between those images, packed with everything he had never explained and everything I had learned to survive without.

I should have hated him more cleanly. That was the worst part.

Had he walked back into my life whole, smiling as though seventeen years were nothing more than bad weather, the anger might have been easier to hold. Instead, he returned bleeding and nearly died before I could ask why. The fear burned through every layer I had spent years laying over the wound.

Beneath them, the same old truth remained.

He had been the love of my life.

Maybe he still was.

I hated that too.

A few minutes later, I pushed away from the wall and returned to work. Shifts didn’t stop for personal disasters. People kept getting sick, getting hurt, and arriving through those doors regardless of whether my world had cracked open.

Jackson remained with me for the rest of the night, settled into the ache beneath my ribs and the tightness around my hands that no amount of scrubbing could erase. He lived inside the one terrible truth I could no longer pretend belonged only to me.

If Jackson Hayes lived through the night, then sooner or later everything was going to change.

3

Deacon

The first thing that comes back is summer.

Not a date or a place he can name right away. Just heat trapped in the earth after sunset, rising through the soles of his boots while night settles around him. Crickets hum somewhere in the dark. Water moves nearby in a slow hush, and the air carries damp grass, lake water, and faint smoke from somebody’s firepit farther off. It feels like a hundred nights stitched together, familiar enough that he doesn’t question it. He stands with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders loose, looking across the water as though he has nowhere else to be.

He hears her before he sees her. Lila had never been loud, but he knows the sound of her, the quiet way she always approached him, careful for half a second before forgetting to be careful at all. She stops beside him, her shoulder brushing his arm lightly enough that it should mean nothing.

It never means nothing.

He turns and finds moonlight caught in her hair, her face half in shadow. She looks the way she did a hundred times over the years and somehow unlike any of them. Younger around the mouth, then older around the eyes. Softer. Sadder. Her image shifts the harder he tries to hold it still, stirring something uneasy beneath his ribs.

“You snuck off,” she says.

A smile pulls at his mouth. “Looks like you did too.”