Page 16 of Deacon

The line remains flat while the alarm shrieks through the room and chaos breaks open around it.

I look at his face, and something inside me splits.

“No!” My voice breaks around the word. “No, don’t—”

The room doesn’t stop.

Nobody stops.

But I do.

Because I know.

I know in the deepest place there is to know anything, somewhere medicine, evidence, and protocol cannot reach. I know the same way I knew he had left before anyone spoke the words aloud seventeen years ago.

The same way I knew when I first looked at Jade that Jackson had been written into our lives in a way I could never erase.

He is leaving.

Again.

“No!” I lean over him, beyond caring who hears me or sees the blood coating my gloves. My voice tears itself apart as the whole room watches me unravel. “Don’t leave me again. Not before I can tell you. Please, Jackson. Not before I can tell you.”

His face doesn’t change.

The line doesn’t move.

Then I woke with the words still clawing their way out of my throat.

I came upright hard and gasping, my whole body jerking with the motion. Blankets tangled around my legs, and my damp nightshirt clung to my back. Hair stuck to the nape of my neck while my heart hammered with enough force to hurt.

For one wild second, I didn’t know where I was.

Trauma lights still burned behind my eyes. The monitor continued screaming somewhere inside my skull, and I could hear my own voice begging him not to leave.

Then my bedroom emerged around me beneath the gray wash of early morning, dim and familiar, and the nightmare broke apart against the simple shape of home.

My door flew open.

“Mom?”

Jade stood in the doorway barefoot and wide awake, her dark hair tangled around her shoulders. One hand braced against the frame as though she had run in too quickly to stop cleanly.

The expression on her face looked too old for sixteen.

She wasn’t frightened exactly. She was alert, worried, and ready for whatever came next.

I dragged in a breath that scraped all the way down and pushed myself against the headboard. “I’m okay.”

The lie came automatically, though my voice sounded wrecked enough to betray it.

Jade remained in the doorway. “You were yelling.”

I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum as though I could steady the frantic pounding beneath it. “Bad dream.”

She stepped farther into the room, cautious but unconvinced. The light spilling in from the hallway caught the crease between her brows.

“What was it about?”