Chapter 22
Callum
I was out the door before I could overthink it. The house felt too still, my head too crowded, and staying inside with nothing but my own thoughts felt like a mistake. I needed motion, something physical to interrupt the loop so I could feel starting again.
The decision wasn’t about discipline or routine.
It was about pressure, too much of it sitting in my chest, in my shoulders, in the space behind my eyes.
Movement felt like the only way to bleed some of it off before it turned into something sharper.
I didn’t set a pace or a distance. I just started moving and trusted my body to figure the rest out.
My stride was uneven, my breathing shallow at first, but the repetition did what it always did.
The sound of my feet on pavement, the rhythm of inhale and exhale, the steady forward pull of my body gave my thoughts fewer places to hide.
They still surfaced, but they didn’t stack.
They passed through instead of circling.
I hadn’t done this in weeks. Too much had been happening, too many days spent reacting instead of choosing. This felt like choosing. Not clarity exactly, but something close enough to keep me steady.
The neighborhood was quiet, early enough that most people were still inside, and I let myself focus on the mechanics of it. The burn in my calves. The rhythm of my breathing. The way my pulse steadied once I stopped fighting it.
Somewhere around the second mile, I thought about Ginny.
By the time I slowed to a walk, sweat cooling on my skin, I felt steadier. The guilt was still there and nothing was solved, but the urge to do something impulsive with all those feelings had finally loosened its grip.
I headed home, stretching my shoulders as I walked, letting my breathing return to normal. The house was still when I stepped inside, and I didn’t linger. I grabbed water, drank too much of it too fast, then reached for my phone for the first time since waking up.
Three missed calls.
All from my mother.
Close together. No voicemail.
The shift was immediate and physical. My stomach tightened, my pulse kicked up again, the calm from the run evaporating in seconds. My mother didn’t do that. She didn’t call repeatedly unless something was wrong, and she never did it without leaving a message unless she thought there wasn’t time.
I called her back right away.
She answered on the second ring.
“Callum,” she said, and there was tension in her voice she wasn’t bothering to hide.
“What happened?” I asked.
There was a pause, brief but weighted, the kind that told me the answer wasn’t going to be simple.
“Ginny had a difficult night,” she said.
I closed my eyes, pressing my thumb into the side of my phone. “Is she okay?”
“She’s stable,” my mother replied, careful with the word. “Physically. But she was very upset.”
I leaned against the wall, the cool surface grounding me. “Why?”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“She received messages from someone,” my mother said. “She didn’t want to show us.”
Something inside me went cold and still.
“Messages,” I repeated.
“Yes.”
That was enough. The shape of it snapped into place instantly, sharp and unmistakable. The secrecy. The timing. The way my mother had avoided saying a name.
Ashley.
My jaw clenched, my breath flattening out as anger gave way to something quieter and far more dangerous.
“She went after Ginny,” I said.
My mother didn’t contradict me.
“She broke down while we were playing a game,” my mother continued. “She tried to hold it together, but eventually she couldn’t. She cried for a while, and then she kept saying she was tired.”
The word lodged under my ribs. I knew exactly what kind of tired she meant. Tired from all of this mess, from the stress, from me.
“Is she safe right now? Is she doing okay?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Thalia’s with her. She’s resting.”
Relief flickered, brief and sharp, then disappeared under a surge of fury that felt almost surgical in its precision.
“How did she get her number?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that this cannot happen again.”
“It won’t,” I said.
There was no hesitation in the words. No doubt.
“I’m coming over,” I added.
“No,” my mother said immediately.
I stiffened. “Why not?”
“She needs quiet,” she replied. “She needs space. You showing up right now would complicate things, even if you mean well.”
I hated how reasonable it was. Hated how powerless it made me feel.
“I’m not going to make it worse,” I said.
“I know you don’t intend to,” she answered. “But intent isn’t the issue.”
We sat in silence for a moment, the weight of that settling between us.
“Handle this,” my mother said finally. “However you need to. Just don’t let it touch her again.”
“I will.”
I ended the call and stood there, phone still in my hand, sweat drying on my skin, heart beating slow and steady now.
The run hadn’t burned this off. It had just cleared the space for it.
Ashley hadn’t just contacted me again.
She had gone after Ginny.
And that changed everything.
I unlocked my phone and went straight to my messages, scrolling until I found the thread with the unfamiliar number, the one I’d already blocked without much thought the night before.
Seeing it again now made my jaw tighten, not with shock but with irritation, the way you feel when you realize a problem you thought was contained has decided to grow legs.
Blocking her wasn’t enough. It had never been enough. Ashley didn’t respect silence, and she didn’t understand boundaries unless they came with consequences attached.
I needed someone who spoke her language.
Marc’s name sat where it always had in my contacts.
We hadn’t talked in years, not because of a falling out but because our lives had diverged in ways that didn’t invite casual check-ins.
Marc had always moved differently than the rest of us, even back in college.
Where other people tested limits, he seemed to catalog them. Where others panicked, he got quiet.
There had been rumors, just enough to make people lower their voices when they mentioned his name. Side businesses, whispers of things that weren’t exactly legal. He was the kind of person who knew how systems worked well enough to bend them without snapping anything too visibly.
Marc didn’t posture. He didn’t threaten. He didn’t brag. Instead, he acted swiftly and harshly when necessary without drawing attention to himself.
That was what made him dangerous.
I hesitated only long enough to acknowledge what I was about to do, then pressed call.
He picked up faster than I expected. “Callum,” he said, like he’d been looking at the screen already. “It has been a while. I have to assume this isn’t a social call.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
A faint exhale on the other end.
“Alright,” Marc replied. “What happened?”
“My wife is recovering from a medical emergency,” I said. “Someone decided to interfere.”
“How?”
“Messages,” I answered. “Deliberate ones, meant to destabilize her.”
There was a pause, and in it I could almost feel him recalibrating, shifting from curiosity to assessment.
“And you want it to stop,” he said.
“I want it finished.”
Marc didn’t ask what she’d said. He didn’t ask why I hadn’t handled it myself.
Instead, he asked, “Is she a problem because she’s reckless, or because she thinks she’s untouchable?”
“Both,” I said.
“That tracks,” he replied mildly. “People like that rely on noise and chaos. Take those away, and they fold.”
“I don’t want escalation,” I said. “I want finality.”
“I understand. I think she may benefit from me helping her understand the stakes of this game.” Marc said.
I paused for a moment before responding.
“Yes, I want her to understand them. I trust your judgement, Marc,” I replied.
Another pause. This one longer, heavier.
“I’ll take care of it,” Marc said finally. “You don’t contact her again. You don’t respond if she tries. You don’t ask how I did it.”
“I won’t.”
“Good,” he said. “Because once I step in, the message only works if it comes from one direction.”
There was something unsettlingly calm in his voice, something that suggested this wasn’t new ground for him, that he knew exactly how to apply pressure without leaving fingerprints behind.
“And Callum,” he added, almost casually, “if she’s the kind of person who went after someone vulnerable, she’s already afraid of the wrong things. I’ll just help her focus.”
I swallowed. “She doesn’t touch my wife again.”
“She won’t,” Marc said.
The line went dead without a goodbye.
I lowered the phone slowly, my pulse steady now, my thoughts unusually clear. Whatever Marc was about to do, it would be quiet, contained, and effective. Ashley would walk away believing it was her idea, or at least believing that staying was far more dangerous than leaving.
I sent my mother a short message, choosing my words carefully.
I’ve handled it. She won’t be able to reach Ginny again.
I didn’t explain how. I didn’t justify myself. She didn’t ask.
I set my phone aside and leaned back against the counter, staring at the far wall as the weight of it all settled. I had crossed a line I couldn’t uncross, enlisted someone who lived comfortably in moral gray because the situation demanded it.
But when I pictured Ginny, exhausted and shaking, blindsided in a place where she should have been safe, the doubt didn’t survive.
Some people needed to be scared off the board.
Not out of cruelty, but of necessity.
And if this was the cost of protecting her, then it was one I would carry without flinching.