Chapter Three #2
Her gaze moved back to Jay Bird. There was nothing overtly threatening about his gaze, but it was intense. He seemed like the sort of man who noticed everything and commented on almost nothing.
But Lily wasn’t afraid of him, and that alone meant more to Willow than he could possibly know.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
Jay Bird gave her a small nod. “She wasn’t any trouble.”
Riley made a suspicious choking noise, like she was trying not to laugh.
Jay Bird glanced at her. “What?”
“Nothing.”
Jay Bird looked back at Willow. “She ate. She slept. She watched some cartoon with a pig that I’m pretty sure has no adult supervision.”
Willow laughed before she could stop herself. “Peppa Pig?”
“That sounds right.”
“She likes Peppa.”
“Yeah. I gathered that after episode twelve. I’m pretty sure I know more about that pig and her family than any grown man should.”
Another laugh slipped out of Willow before she could stop it.
Then the questions came rushing back.
“What happened?” She looked at Riley. “How did I get here?”
“You passed out in front of the gym,” Riley explained. “The doctors said you were severely dehydrated and exhausted. Your body basically decided it was done, whether you agreed with it or not.”
Pieces started coming back. She remembered standing outside the gym and looking for Riley. The doors opened, and suddenly there were people everywhere. Too many people. But she remembered Riley. And—
Willow’s gaze drifted to Jay Bird, a flicker of recognition tightening in her chest. She remembered him too. Not clearly, just in broken flashes: a big man moving fast through the chaos, strong arms reaching for her before everything went black.
“Jay Bird caught you,” Riley said, following her gaze. “Both of you, actually. You were holding Lily when you went down. He got to you before either of you hit the pavement.”
Her arms tightened instinctively around her daughter.
“Thank you,” she whispered again, the words carrying far more weight this time.
Jay Bird held her gaze for a moment before giving her another quiet nod.
For the next few minutes, the room settled into something almost normal.
Lily stayed curled against Willow’s side, happily eating her fries while the others talked quietly around them.
Willow was still trying to wrap her head around everything.
Riley was here. Mia was alive. Lily was safe.
And somehow, after three years of constantly looking over her shoulder, Willow was sitting in a hospital room surrounded by people who seemed to want to help her.
Eventually, Riley pulled a chair closer to the bed.
The change in her expression was subtle, but Willow noticed it. The warmth was still there, but something else lay beneath it. Something more serious.
“Willow, I need to ask you something, and I don’t want you to feel like you have to talk about anything before you’re ready.”
Willow knew what was coming before Riley even finished. What happened? It was the question Willow had spent three years imagining someone asking her if she ever managed to get away.
She also knew Riley wasn’t asking only as her friend.
Riley was law enforcement. Willow remembered that much.
And strangely, that made answering easier rather than harder.
If telling Riley everything she knew could keep Chen away from her and Lily—if it could give the police enough to find him—Willow would sit there and talk until she had no voice left.
“You want to know what happened.”
Riley nodded. “I do. But we can do this privately if you want. Everyone can step out.”
Willow glanced around the room. At Mia. At the three men she had only just met. She probably should have wanted privacy, but what was the point? If these people were part of Riley and Mia’s lives, they would hear some version of it eventually.
Her gaze dropped to Lily, who was currently busy making her elephant dance across the blanket, completely oblivious to the conversation happening around her.
Lily might not understand most of what Willow said, but that didn’t matter.
She didn’t want her little girl sitting there listening while her mother talked about Chen.
She didn’t want that name, or any of the things that came with it, touching Lily any more than they already had.
Before Willow could say anything, Jay Bird seemed to figure out what she was thinking.
He reached for one of the bags that had come with them and started digging through it. A moment later, he pulled out a tablet in a thick pink case, followed by a pair of matching child-sized headphones.
Willow stared at him. Where in the world had those come from?
“A friend of ours picked up some things for Lily,” Riley explained, apparently reading the question on her face. “Clothes, snacks, toiletries. A few toys. She grabbed the tablet so Lily would have something to watch or play with while you rested.”
Willow didn’t even know what to say to that. People who didn’t know them had gone shopping for her daughter.
“Peppa?” Lily asked the second she spotted the tablet.
Jay Bird chuckled. “I had a feeling you were going to say that.”
He looked at Willow first, silently asking permission again.
She nodded.
He crouched beside the bed and helped Lily put on the headphones, patiently adjusting them over her ears before finding the show she wanted. Lily immediately scooted against Willow’s side, her attention completely captured by the screen.
Jay Bird tapped the headphones. “Can you hear me?”
Lily didn’t even look up.
“Guess that answers that,” he muttered.
Despite everything, Willow smiled. Then she looked back at Riley.
Here goes everything. And she told them.
Not every detail. Willow wasn’t sure she could survive saying every detail out loud yet.
But she told Riley about being taken three years ago.
About waking up and realizing Chen had her.
About the threats that made it clear running wasn’t as simple as finding an unlocked door.
She explained how he controlled where she went, who she spoke to, what she was allowed to do. In a nutshell, he controlled her life.
She told them about Lily, and discovering she was pregnant and knowing instantly that everything had changed. From that moment on, surviving wasn’t only about her anymore.
Then she told them about the opportunity that had finally come. The tiny opening she’d been waiting years for. How terrified she had been that Chen would realize what she was doing before she could get Lily away. How she had grabbed whatever she could carry, taken her daughter, and ran.
She told them about the three weeks she spent on the run until she ended up in Virginia Beach.
By the time Willow finished speaking, her throat ached, and her hands trembled in her lap.
Jay Bird had been through some ugly shit in his life.
He had seen what people were capable of doing to one another. His job had taken him into places most people only saw on the news, and there were things buried in his memory he’d be perfectly happy never thinking about again.
But sitting there listening to Willow calmly describe the last three years of her life hit him differently.
Maybe because she didn’t seem to realize how damn remarkable she was.
She wasn’t telling the story like someone looking for sympathy.
Half the time, she seemed almost apologetic, as if she needed to explain why she hadn’t escaped sooner.
Jay Bird had to bite his tongue more than once, because from where he was sitting, she hadn’t failed to escape—she had survived, and there was a difference.
For three years, Willow had done whatever she needed to do to stay alive.
Then she had gotten pregnant and somehow found enough strength to protect a little girl in the middle of a nightmare.
She had kept Lily sheltered from enough of it that the kid could still laugh over French fries and get excited about a cartoon pig.
And when Willow finally saw an opening, she had taken it. No backup. No team waiting outside. No weapon. No guarantee she would make it farther than the front door. She had just grabbed her daughter and run.
Jay Bird glanced at Lily. She was tucked against her mother, pink headphones covering her ears, completely engrossed in the tablet. Every so often her little feet kicked beneath the blanket.
Then his gaze shifted back to Willow. There was something about the two of them that had gotten under his skin from the second he had seen Willow standing outside Nova’s gym.
He still couldn’t explain it, and maybe he never would. He had spent enough of his life watching people he cared about get hurt to know exactly why he usually kept a certain amount of distance.
Being the last unattached guy on the team had become a running joke, and he had been perfectly fine with it.
That was until a terrified little girl had latched onto him as her mother collapsed into his arms.
Now, sitting there listening to everything Willow had survived, that same protective pull he had felt yesterday settled even deeper.
He didn’t know what happened next. He didn’t know what Willow would want or whether she would even let him close enough to help.
But Chen was still out there, and Willow and Lily had already spent far too long facing him alone.
Jay Bird rested his forearms on his thighs, his gaze lingering on the woman and little girl sitting together on the hospital bed.
If Willow let him, he wanted to be the man who stood between them and Chen.
“How long do I have to stay here?”
“The doctor mentioned coming back to check on you this morning. If everything looks good, I don’t think they’ll keep you much longer,” Riley told her.
Willow nodded, but instead of feeling relieved, her stomach twisted.
She had been so focused on getting away from Chen that she hadn’t really thought beyond that. There hadn’t been room for anything beyond putting as much distance between her and Chen.