Chapter 34 MAYA
MAYA
The heart monitor bips that my father is alive.
Steady. Regular. The green line on the screen tracing its small mountains and valleys, each peak a contraction, each valley a rest, the mechanical proof that Ray Reeves is still here.
Still breathing. Still occupying the narrow hospital bed with the guardrails up and the IV line running from a bag on a pole to the bruised crook of his left arm.
He's napping. His face is slack in a way I've never seen on my father, the specific looseness of a body that has been through something enormous and is conserving everything it has left.
His cheeks are thinner than they were just a few months ago.
His hair, which was always more salt than pepper, has gone fully white.
He's going to be okay. The doctors said so. Moderate cardiac event. Caught early enough.
But he's sixty-one years old and the heart can be tricky.
I stand by the window. The blinds are half-closed, cutting the Los Angeles light into strips that fall across the linoleum floor. The room smells of antiseptic and recycled air. No rosemary. No woodsmoke. No coffee brewed at five in the morning.
I think about last week.
I drove myself to the airport. The highway unspooling ahead, Montana shrinking in the rearview mirror. I couldn't do the airport goodbye. I couldn't stand on a curb with a suitcase and watch their faces while I left.
It was hard enough to say goodbye at the cabin. Reid's hand on my jaw, his thumb against my cheekbone, his eyes searching mine for something I couldn’t give him.
Jace's arms around me so tight I could feel his heartbeat. I can still hear him saying that he should come with me. And the look on his face when I told him no.
Owen standing slightly back, his hands in his pockets, his face composed, his eyes not.
They understood that I had to come and be with my father. But, they also understood what it was. A goodbye.
Reid texted that night. Did you arrive safe? Two days later, another. We're here when you're ready. I didn't answer either one.
Jace called. Three times the first day. Twice the second. Once the third. After that, nothing. The silence of a man who got the message.
Owen didn't reach out. At all.
The heart monitor beeps. Sixty-two. Sixty-two. Sixty-two.
The door opens and my mother walks in, followed by Amy, the nurse that has the morning shift.
My mum also looks aged and tired. Her hair is pulled back but not styled.
Her clothes are clean but they don’t match.
She's been sleeping at the hospital, going home only to shower and change, and the routine has worn her down.
"How is he?" she asks.
"Napping. Vitals are steady."
Amy checks the IV, makes a note on the chart, adjusts the pillows. She's young, efficient, and most importantly kind.
"You two have been in here too long," she says. "He's stable. I'll keep an eye on him. Go eat something. The cafeteria on the second floor has decent coffee, if you don't set your expectations too high."
We both start to protest but Amy looks at both of us with the expression of someone who has had this conversation a thousand times and always wins it.
We go.
The cafeteria is bright in a way the room wasn't, fluorescent, cheerful, aggressively normal. People eating sandwiches. A television on the wall telling the latest news. The coffee is bad but hot and I wrap both hands around the cup because the warmth is grounding.
My mother sits across from me. She eats a few bites of a sandwich. I eat nothing. The coffee is enough.
"I don't understand it," The words come out slowly, like I'm pulling them through something thick. "Dad has always been so careful. His diet. The walking. The annual checkups. He was the healthiest person I knew."
My mother's hands still on the sandwich. She doesn't look up.
"The doctor said it could be stress-related," she adds carefully.
"Stress from what? He's retired. He reads. He gardens. He plays piano at the community center on Thursdays."
She doesn't answer.
"Mom, what aren't you telling me?"
She sets the sandwich down. Wipes her fingers on a napkin, slowly, the deliberate movements of a woman buying time. She folds the napkin. Sets it aside.
"Mom."
"There have been some... incidents." She says the word like she's testing whether it can carry the weight. "At the house."
"What kind of incidents?"
She looks at me, and what I see in her eyes is exhaustion. Deep, structural, the kind that sleep doesn't fix because the thing causing it doesn't stop when you close your eyes.
"Men," she says. "Coming to the house. Calling. Showing up at the door at odd hours." She pauses. Swallows. "Those... sites. The ones from before. They've been updated. With our address."
The cafeteria noise folds away.
I hear her. I process the words.
Daniel.
He couldn't find me. So he changed the target. He updated the profiles with my parents' address.
And men came. Strangers, following the breadcrumbs Daniel left, expecting what was advertised, showing up at the door of a sixty-one-year-old retired music teacher and his wife.
Time and time again. The violation and the slow, grinding stress of it and he didn't tell me because he knew I would blame myself. He had a heart attack because he was protecting me.
The same way I thought I was protecting them with my absence.
Everyone suffering in silence. And the only person who benefits from the silence is Daniel Hargrove, who is free, who is untouched, who is living his life in Los Angeles while the people I love absorb the cost of what he did.
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"Because you'd already been through enough." She says it simply.
I feel blinding rage invade me.
But then, and I can’t explain why, something I read on a poster on the Wolf Rescue Center comes to my mind. Wolves fight, bleed and die for their pack. For those who have proven worthy of loyalty.
And with a strange certainty, that I don’t really know where it came from I say, "I'm going to fix this."
My mother reaches across the table and takes my hand. Her fingers are cold. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to.
We finish the coffee and go back upstairs.
Amy meets us in the hallway outside my father's room. She's smiling the professional smile that means good news delivered efficiently.
"He's doing well. Still resting. The doctor came by while you were gone and said if everything continues like this, he could go home within a few days."
Relief. Real, physical, a loosening in my chest that I didn't know was clenched.
"Oh," the nurse adds, already turning away, already moving to the next task. "A man stopped by while you were downstairs. Left flowers."
I look past her into the room.
On the table beside my father's bed, next to the water pitcher and the plastic cup with the bendable straw, there is a vase. White lilies. Elegant. Expensive. The kind of arrangement a person sends when they want the gesture to be noticed.
I cross the room. My hand finds the small card tucked among the stems.
Get well soon. Daniel.