I read to him until he falls asleep. The Dinosaur Who Played Football — a book Olivia found in the hospital gift shop that combines the only two subjects William currently acknowledges as real. His eyes get heavy around page six, when Rex the quarterback throws the winning touchdown with his tiny arms, and by page eight his breathing has evened out and his hand is curled around my finger like a small, warm anchor.
I sit with him for a while after the book closes. Watch his chest rise and fall. Count the beeps of the heart monitor — steady, strong, the rhythm of a boy whose body is stitching itself back together one cell at a time. The crayon drawing of Jared Morgan stares at me from the nightstand with its wild green scribble-eyes and its smile that extends past the face.
My phone buzzes. I ease my finger free of William's grip — slow, careful, the extraction requiring the precision of a surgeon — and check the screen.
Luke.
I step into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind me until it clicks. The hallway is quiet — shift change between visitors, the fluorescent lights humming their constant, institutional hymn. I lean against the wall and read.
Anna's been asking questions around the facility. She cornered Claire's assistant today — wanted to know who arranged the proposal, who planned the photo schedule, why all your public appearances are scripted down to the minute. She also pulled one of the equipment guys aside asking if he'd ever seen you and Jared together before the engagement. She knows something's off, Mia. Be careful.
The floor tilts. I read the message twice, three times, each pass adding another layer of nausea. Anna. Methodical, relentless Anna with her perfect ponytail and her territorial smile and her memory for every detail that doesn't add up. She's not guessing. She's not jealous-girlfriend snooping or petty-rival gossip-hunting. She's investigating — pulling at the threads of our cover story one conversation at a time, interviewing witnesses like a prosecutor building a case she already knows she'll win.
I can see her doing it. The practiced casualness, the strategic questions dropped into conversations like coins into a slot machine. Oh, isn't it cute how their dates are always at the same three restaurants? Who picks those, anyway? The assistant wouldn't have stood a chance. Claire's team is loyal to Claire, not to Jared, and Anna would know exactly where the seams are weakest.
The threats on the driveway. Ron circling with his fabricated paternity lie and his tick-tock countdown. Robert Kane and his elaborate watch and his bathroom ambush. And now Anna, disassembling the facade from the inside, asking exactly the right questions to exactly the right people. The walls are closing in from every direction and the room I'm standing in is getting smaller by the hour.
I text back: How much does she know?
Luke's reply is fast — thirty seconds, maybe less, the speed of a man who was waiting for the question. Not enough yet. But she's not stopping.
I stare at the screen. My thumb hovers over the keyboard but I don't type because the thoughts are coming too fast and none of them are good. I think about the PR folder — the one Anna bumped at the stadium weeks ago, the pages that spilled across the corridor floor before I snatched them back. Scheduled locations. Scripted intimate moments. Talking points for interviews. Every piece of evidence that our love story is a production designed by committee and executed on a timeline.
If Anna finds the contract itself — the actual document, the signatures, the payment schedule, the clause that specifies exactly how many public appearances per week and what constitutes a breach — everything collapses.
The engagement becomes a headline. Jared's rehabilitation narrative becomes a scandal. Coach's carefully constructed redemption arc becomes a fraud investigation. The Cinderella story that trending hashtags are built on becomes proof that love is a product and football is a lie and the janitor who married the quarterback was paid to do it.
And the second hundred thousand hasn't come yet. William's surgery is covered but the future isn't — the follow-up appointments, the medication, the years of cardiac monitoring that stretch ahead like a road with no end. I'm still trapped inside the structure, still load-bearing, still holding up walls that other people built around me.
I type: Thank you for telling me. Then delete it. Type: Can you find out what she has? Then delete that too. Finally I send: I'll handle it. The words look braver on the screen than they feel in my chest.
My phone buzzes again. Different number. Jared. The notification drops down from the top of the screen and his name sits there like a summons.
Where are you? I told you to stay home.
The phrasing lands in my stomach like a stone. I told you. Two hours ago I would have bristled at the command. Two hours ago I would have typed something sharp and dismissive about not being a piece of furniture he can position in rooms. But that was before the driveway. Before the red letters. Before I sat in a silent house listening to floorboards creak and wondering if the person who painted those words was still outside.
I text back, my jaw tight: Hospital. With William. I wasn't staying in that house alone.
A long pause. The three dots appear at the bottom of the screen. Disappear. Appear again. Disappear. Appear. The particular torture of watching someone compose and delete and recompose, their thoughts visible only as a pulsing ellipsis that could mean anything from fury to tenderness to something in between that doesn't have a name yet.
Then: I'll pick you up in an hour. Don't leave without me.
I stare at the message. A month ago those words would have read like a command — another man telling me where to go and when and how, another set of hands on the steering wheel of my life.
Tonight they read differently. Tonight I hear the thing underneath the instruction: a man who came home to an empty house after seeing death threats painted on his own concrete and didn't know where the woman who slept in his arms was. A man who's scared to let me out of his sight because the list of people trying to hurt us is growing faster than either of us can count.
I put the phone down on the windowsill. Press my forehead against the glass. Through it I can see William sleeping — his small chest rising and falling under the hospital blanket, the coloring pages scattered around him like fallen leaves, the signed football on one side and the crayon Jared on the other. His world is small and bright and made of primary colors and he has no idea that the adults in it are drowning.
"I'm going to keep you safe, baby." My voice is barely a whisper, aimed at the glass, fogging it with every word. "No matter what."
I just don't know from what anymore. The threats keep multiplying and the sources keep shifting — Ron with his lies, Anna with her questions, the anonymous figure painting blood promises on driveways — and I can't build a wall high enough to protect him from dangers I can't even identify. I can't fight what I can't see.
But I can stand between my son and whatever's coming, the way I've always stood, the way mothers stand — not because we're brave but because the alternative is unthinkable.
The corridor is empty. The monitors beep. Somewhere down the hall a nurse laughs at something and the sound is so normal it hurts. I pick up the phone, read Jared's message one more time — don't leave without me — and wait.