Page 13 of Yours on the Canvas

I open them as best I can, and blink around the blood, as I look at the person who leans over me, she smiles gently.

“Good.” Her voice stays quiet and calm, steadying me against the rush of hospital noise around us. “You are in the Emergency Department. A young couple found you on the road.”

I barely process the words as she explains what they’ve done. The sharp pinch from earlier came from an IV. She mentions a bedside ultrasound, fractured and bruised ribs. The list goes on but my mind can’t hold onto any of it.

Darkness takes me again, until I wake up later, the room now quiet. A monitor beeps steadily beside me, each sound marking another second I’m still alive. A sliver of pale light cuts through the dim room, and the sterile smell immediately tells me where I am.

Hospital.

I turn my head, and pain tears through my throat as I swallow against the dryness in my mouth. I lift an arm and stare at the clear IV line running into my vein.

The crushing pressure in my chest has eased into a deep, persistent ache. The medication is doing its job, even if every part of me still feels like it has been put through a fucking meat grinder.

The privacy curtain slides open, and a nurse walks in carrying a clipboard.

“Well, hello there.” She gives me a warm smile.

I can’t speak, so I wiggle my fingers weakly in greeting.

“I’m pleased to see you’re awake. You gave us quite a scare, you know. You were lucky that young couple decided to turn down that dead-end road.” She smiles and gives me a wink, as she checks something on the clipboard at the foot of my bed.

“They said you told them your name was Silas?”

I shake my head.

Lifting my hand, I make a writing motion with my finger.

She understands immediately and pulls a notepad and pen from her pocket before handing them to me.

My fingers shake as I write my real name.

Then I add one more instruction.

Call Silas. Campbell River. My name’s Jack.

I give it back to her, along with his number, her expression softens as she reads it. “Okay. I’ll do that right now, Jack.” She slips the notepad into her pocket and steps outside.

I sink back against the pillow. Guess Silas is going to find out that I’ve been lying to him all along.

I close my eyes, wondering if he’s going to hate me as much as I hate myself.

4

Silas

The clock in the lounge reads 11:42 p.m. by the time exhaustion from my day settles over me. I know I should go to bed, but I just can’t make it that far tonight, so I drop my heavy frame onto the couch.

I rub the bridge of my nose, trying to ease the pressure building behind my eyes, but it does nothing to shift the exhaustion that’s been dragging at me for weeks.

Jack keeps pushing through my thoughts instead. The bruises I’ve noticed lately, the scratches on his arms and face—he brushed them off as bakery accidents, but I’ve spent too many years around violence to mistake the difference between clumsy slips and marks left by fists and fingernails.

Surely he isn’t fighting again. There’s no reason for him to go back to that life, not now, not after everything he has been through.

When he gets home, I’ll sit him down and talk to him, no accusations or assumptions, just a chance for him to tell me what’s going on.

Upstairs, Hale is finally asleep, worn out from hockey training. I’d watched him earlier from the parents’ section while he tore across the ice with that huge grin of his, laughing like the world had never touched him.

He lights up out there, looks like any other ten-year-old, and I fucking love that. After everything he’s been through, more than any kid should ever have to endure, he deserves moments like that. He deserves to feel safe enough to forget, even for an hour, that life hasn’t always been kind to him.