Epilogue
Six months later…
Silas
August in Baltimore is humid, relentless, and entirely indifferent to the fact that I grew up in the dry, unforgiving cold of North Dakota.
I have worked in worse. Mosul in July. Djibouti in August. The Helmand Valley in full kit when the temperature hits a hundred and fifteen, and the air tastes like a cocktail of dust and diesel. Baltimore is nothing compared to that, but the humidity here clings to you like a wet wool blanket.
The conservatory is the worst of it. The jasmine has gone rampant, the walled garden is a wall of green noise from the cicadas, and the cracked pane in the upper corner is letting in stagnant air that feels like a physical weight.
Fixing it is the only way to quiet the itch in my brain.
"You're on a ladder," Ava says from the doorway. “We talked about this.”
I don’t look down. I know exactly how she looks right now: coffee in hand, hair loose, her glasses slightly fogged from the transition into the heat. "I remember," I say.
"Really? Because you seem to have forgotten about the titanium pin in your shoulder."
"Also remember."
"Silas. Please be careful."
"Yes, dear," I say, and I can't help the wink I throw her way.
She sighs, a sound of fond exasperation, and waits for me to climb down. She hands me the coffee and leans against the doorframe, watching the window.
“Silas, I wanted to—"
My phone vibrates at my hip. I open the feed from Ava’s cameras, the house laid out across my screen. Reese’s vehicle is pulling through the front gate. Verity is in the passenger seat, and Bandit’s tongue is already lolling against the rear window.
"They're early," I say.
Ava’s eyes dart toward the door, then back to me. "Oh, I… I was hoping to…"
I step off the last rung and take her hand. Her skin is warm, but her pulse is fast. “What is it?”
She swallows, offering a smile that’s too brittle to be real. “It can wait.”
In my world, "it can wait" is usually the preface to a disaster you didn't see coming.
I’ve spent twenty years reading the minute shifts in a person’s posture before they pull a trigger or a lead. I know the way skin tightens around the jaw when someone is holding back a hit. Ava isn't a threat, but she’s a variable I can’t solve right now, and the lack of data is gnawing at me.
Her hand is in mine, but she’s not there. She’s somewhere internal, checking a perimeter I can’t see.
When she tugs me toward the front door, I let her lead, but the tactical part of my brain—the part that never actually sleeps—starts running through the possibilities. Is it her mother? Is it a patient? Or is it us?
I push the concern into a compartment for later, but it doesn't stay quiet. It hums under my skin, a low-level vibration that makes the Baltimore humidity feel ten degrees hotter.
Something is coming. And for the first time in a long time, I have no idea if I’m prepared to catch it.
Reese pulls up, and Bandit is out of the truck before the dust settles. He’s a blue-eyed blur of white fur, entirely unsuited for a Maryland summer, and he makes a beeline for the hydrangeas.
Verity comes up the steps first, hair pinned up against the heat, heading straight for Ava. They have that easy, six-month shorthand now—the bond of women who have to navigate the silences of men like us. Reese follows, and we trade a look and a handshake that says everything it needs to.
“You’re early. You check out the office?”
“Had to,” Reese says. “Boss keeps us on a short leash.”
“Funny. Maybe you should apply that to your mutt.”
Bandit finishes his recon of the flowerbeds and nails Ava with unerring accuracy, planting two paws right on her white shirt. She flinches—a sharp, visceral recoil I’ve never seen from her—and steps back into the shade of the porch.
"Bandit," Verity says sharply, but Ava is already turning for the door, her face a shade of pale that has nothing to do with the heat.
"Inside," she says. "It's too hot out here."
The kitchen is marginally better, the ceiling fan churning the air in slow, heavy circles.
Ava moves to the pitcher of lemonade Carla made, but her hands are clumsy.
Reese leans against the counter, looking as relaxed as if he’s back at the ranch, while Bandit collapses onto the cold tile with a dramatic huff.
The conversation flows—work, the new office, Reese ribbing me about a rough landing in the Pilatus. But I’m watching my wife. She’s laughing at the right cues, but she’s staring at her lemonade like she’s forgotten how to drink it. She’s miles away.
She’s performing. She’s laughing at the right cues and refilling glasses, but there’s a distance behind her eyes that’s growing by the minute. She’s on a frequency I haven’t seen since the cabin.
Reese is mid-story about a job in Savannah, his voice steady and familiar over the low hum of the ceiling fan. Verity is laughing, leaning back in her chair, while Bandit has finally surrendered to the heat, rolling onto his back on the tile with his paws in the air.
On the surface, it’s exactly the kind of afternoon we’ve had dozens of times before.
But Ava isn't in it. She’s sitting perfectly still, her fingers tight around her glass, watching the condensation bead on the surface. She isn't eating; she isn't even looking at Reese.
Without a word, she sets her glass down. The sharp clink of the coaster hitting the marble is the only warning I get before she’s on her feet. She doesn't offer an excuse or a "be right back." She just dashes out of the room, her footsteps fading fast down the hallway.
The story stops. The laughter dies in Verity's throat. Reese doesn't even finish his sentence; he just looks at the empty doorway, then at me.
There isn’t a drop of irony in his voice when he repeats the words I once told him. “Your wife needs you,” he says.
I’m on my feet before he finishes the sentence.
Ava
The downstairs bathroom is cool and quiet, and it smells faintly of the lemon verbena diffuser Carla keeps on the shelf above the sink. I sit on the edge of the tub and wait for the world to stop tilting.
It doesn’t.
I press the back of my hand to my mouth and breathe through my nose the way I tell my patients to breathe—slowly, deliberately, giving the body enough time to catch up.
For the last two months, I’ve been so busy adjusting to life with Silas, I haven’t once stopped to ask myself why nothing smells right, why everything feels too loud, and why Bandit—who smells perfectly fine by any objective measure—sent me fleeing my own kitchen.
I look at myself in the mirror above the sink and breathe out a prayer that he will understand. Even through the wood of the door, I can feel the weight of his presence. He isn't just standing there; he’s waiting, his senses likely already screaming that something has shifted in the air between us.
"I’m fine, Silas. You can come in," I say.
The door opens slowly, as if he’s unsure of what he will find. He doesn't look panicked, but there’s a depth in his eyes that tells me he’s been paying closer attention than I have. For six months, he’s been reading me better than I’ve been reading myself.
"Are you sick?" he says quietly. There’s no alarm in his voice.
"I was this morning," I say. "Before you were up. I wanted to take a test before I said anything."
Silas steps inside and closes the door behind him. He looks at me for a long moment. Just me. Nothing else in the world seems to exist for him. He doesn't ask for the result. He just takes both my hands in his.
“Have you looked yet?” he asks.
I shake my head.
He releases a slow breath. "You want to wait until they’re gone?”
I lean my head against his shoulder, careful not to place too much pressure on the right side. “I really don’t know.”
“So we pray," he says.
We bow our heads together in the quiet of the bathroom.
He prays the way he prays for everything—without performance, without pretense.
Just a humble man talking to God in a small, tiled room while the heat of August presses hard against the window.
He prays that whatever the outcome, the Lord will give us the strength to accept it.
That His will would be done. That we would trust Him, either way.
My hands aren’t entirely steady as I open the drawer. The test is where I left it, face down, hidden behind a box of Band-Aids.
I pick it up. I breathe. I turn it over.
All the air leaves my lungs.
Two lines.
"Is that a—" he says, his voice cracking.
My hand flies to my mouth.
He doesn't speak immediately. His eyes fill.
He doesn't look away. He doesn't blink. He doesn't reach for control. He just lets the weight of the news consume his entire person. He takes my face in both hands—careful, the way he’s careful with everything that matters—and presses his forehead to mine.
Outside, Reese laughs at something. I hear Bandit's claws on the tile. The steady rhythm of the ceiling fan. August pressing hot and green against the window. And in here, just the two of us, the test still in my hand, and the heavy silence of a new beginning.
He pulls back just enough to look me in the eye. His thumb moves across my cheek, catching a stray tear.
"We’re having a baby," he says. It isn't a question. It’s a promise.
"Bless you," he whispers.
And as he pulls me back into his chest, I realize he isn't really talking to me.
He’s talking to the life he’s already decided to protect.
***