Page 42 of Deacon

He moved toward it before he could stop himself.

Light flared ahead.

This wasn’t moonlight or the soft glow from the Morgan porch. It was hospital light, machine light, the harsh brightness of pain waiting for him.

Jackson recoiled, and the dark surged around him as though protecting its claim. For one moment, it worked. Grass returned beneath his hands. Water moved behind him, and Lila laughed somewhere just ahead.

He lunged toward her, desperate now.

She was already fading.

The younger version of Lila blurred first, her face slipping in and out of focus. The lake flattened into a mechanical hum, and the stars fractured into cold white points, too bright and steady to belong to any sky.

“No.”

The word tore through him as both plea and threat.

The dark gave him one final fragment.

Lila at eighteen, her eyes wet and brave, her mouth trembling around words too quiet to possess the power they carried.

I love you.

The memory struck hard enough to drop him.

He had loved her too.

That was the truth he never outran. War hadn’t erased it. Roads, patches, violence, and time had only buried it beneath other names.

He loved her, and it hadn’t been enough to make him stay.

Maybe loving her had been the reason he left.

The truth pulsed through the dark like a wound tearing open.

Then her voice returned from the other side, softer now, as though she spoke more to herself than to him.

“That’s enough. No more pushing.”

No.

He wanted her to continue. Even if her voice dragged him toward pain, he wanted it because it was real. After seventeen years of silence, he couldn’t bear losing the sound of her now that he had found it again.

Don’t go.

The thought tore through him so violently that he almost believed she might hear it.

Jackson reached toward her.

This time, the light caught him before he could retreat.

It split the darkness in a blinding seam, and sound rushed through behind it. Machines beeped. Air hissed. His body returned in pieces, carrying the deep animal ache of flesh broken hard and healing slowly.

Grief arrived with it.

Reality told him the memories were finished. They weren’t gone. They would never be gone. But the lake no longer waited around him. Twenty was seventeen years behind him, and the girl he loved had lived an entire life without him. She had become a woman he no longer knew how to reach.

Rage burned through him, trapped inside a body that still refused to answer.