24. Shiloh
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SHILOH
Cal is mine tonight.
His room—that is what a watch means. Not the hallway, though I know every person who passes it.
Not the elevator, though Nash has a man posted there with a jacket too expensive for hospital work and eyes mean enough to make visitors reconsider wrong turns.
Not the nurses’ station, though I have charmed two nurses, irritated the shit out of one, and learned which orderly smokes on the roof when he’s supposed to be restocking linens.
Cal.
His room. His monitors. His breath dragging through a machine with a sound I am starting to hate.
I sit in the chair by the window with one ankle crossed over the other and a paper cup of terrible coffee cooling in my hand, listening to the ventilator and trying not to think about Reva’s face when Nash told her Cal had worsened.
The complication is sitting in the room with us like a fifth person, quiet and unwelcome.
Blood pressure drop. Labs moving the wrong direction.
Doctors watching for slow bleeding or infection or whatever name they need to give the fact that a good man took a bullet meant for a girl who had already lost too much.
Cal looks smaller like this, which as a man, I resent.
Men like Cal Boudreaux should be allowed to age stubbornly, to complain about weather and coffee and Reva’s taste in men. They should not be reduced to pale skin, IV lines, and a machine breathing for them while everyone who loves them bargains with a God none of us trust.
The door eases open.
I do not reach for my gun because Deacon has a way of entering a room that makes the air recognize him first.
“Let her see him,” he says.
I turn.
Reva stands beside him in a dark hoodie with her braid half coming apart and her face completely wrong.
No color. No fight sitting close to the surface.
Her eyes look too wide, too fixed, like she has seen something she cannot fit behind them and has decided to keep standing until her body figures out what to do with the damage.
My chest tightens.
“Yank,” I say softly.
She looks at me, but I am not sure she sees me. Her gaze moves past my shoulder to the bed, and whatever is left of her expression breaks.
I stand at once.
Deacon’s eyes meet mine over her head. His face tells me very little, which is useful in most cases but infuriating in this one. Earlier, before my first shift, he told me only enough to keep me from putting a bullet in the wrong person.
Marisol Hart is alive.
Let her visit if she comes back.
That was it. Deacon Cross, patron saint of missing details, left me with a dead woman breathing and a girl I love walking toward a truth sharp enough to cut the whole night open.
Reva crosses to Cal’s bed without speaking.
I want to touch her, but I keep my hands to myself. She looks held together by one thin wire, and I cannot tell whether kindness would steady her or snap it. Instead, I step back and let her take my place beside him.
She picks up Cal’s hand in both of hers, and her shoulders fold inward.
Deacon stays by the door, body angled toward the hall, one hand low at his side. He is pale beneath the fluorescent light, probably bleeding again under that clean shirt because the man is about as careful and sedate as Homer.
“What happened?” I ask him under my breath.
His gaze stays on Reva. “She saw her.”
“No shit. I got that far.”
His jaw shifts.
Reva bends over Cal’s hand, whispering something I cannot hear. It is private enough that I turn away.
Deacon finally looks at me. “Stay with her.”
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere.”
The lie is clean and immediate. I admire craft, even when it insults me.
I glance through the interior window blinds, toward the dim hall and the older wing beyond it. The chapel sits that way. I saw the woman go that direction earlier.
“Fine,” I say. “You stay with her, then.”
His eyes narrow.
I smile without feeling a drop of charm. “Cal has two Blackwood men in the hall, one nurse I trust because she told me to stop flirting and sit down, and you standing there looking like murder found religion. I’m going for a walk.”
“Shiloh—”
“No.”
Reva doesn’t look up from Cal. I leave before Deacon can decide whether stopping me is worth the noise.
The chapel door is closed when I reach it.
For a second, I stand in the hallway and let my palm rest flat against the wood. Hospitals have a particular kind of silence at night, padded and mechanical, every sound softened by exhaustion. Somewhere, an elevator dings. A nurse laughs once at the station and cuts herself off quickly.
In front of me, Marisol Hart sits with answers she has no right to keep.
I open the door.
She is still there, sitting in the front pew with a straight spine, hands clasped loosely in her lap rather than clenched in prayer.
She has Reva’s hair, dark with threads of silver.
Reva’s mouth too, though softened by age and grief.
Around the eyes, the resemblance is worse.
Clear enough that it makes me angry on Reva’s behalf, because how the hell is a girl supposed to survive burying a face only to find it waiting in a hospital chapel fifteen years later?
Marisol turns her head. She knows me before I speak.
“Shiloh Lafitte,” she says.
My hand stays on the back of the last pew. “That saves time spent on introductions.”
“Cal talked about you.”
“Did he?”
Her mouth trembles slightly. She controls it. “He said you made Reva laugh when she was trying very hard not to.”
That goes under my ribs and twists.
I walk down the aisle slowly, stopping two pews behind her because crowding a grieving mother, dead or alive, is bad manners, and because I am angry enough that distance seems wise.
“Marisol Hart,” I say. “Back from the dead.”
She closes her eyes for a second.
When she opens them, she looks older. “I know what you must think.”
“I doubt that.”
“No,” she says softly. “Perhaps you don’t.”
The charm is usually there when I need it. A reflex. A pretty blade. Tonight I can’t seem to find it—but then, I’m not looking very hard.
“You can talk to me now,” I tell her. “You can give me enough truth to make things easier when your daughters are ready to look at you. Or you can keep your privacy, and I will use every ounce of influence I have to make sure neither of those girls ever has to find you by accident again.”
Pain crosses her face. She deserves that little cruelty, even if I’m not particularly proud of dishing it out.
I hold on to it, anyway.
“You would keep them from me?”
“I would keep anyone away who hurts them, particularly from Reva.” I shift my weight a little, lean a bit closer. “Reva is mine.”
“I am their mother.”
“Mmm. And one of them thought you were dead while the other learned obedience from the woman who ordered you dead.” My voice stays low because volume is cheap, and I want every word to arrive clean.
Marison laughs a little. “I thought you were the nice one.”
“You don’t get the nice version, sorry.” I shrug.
Marisol’s hands tighten in her lap. “I guess I don’t deserve the nice version.”
“No, ma’am. You do not.”
She flinches at ma’am, which gives me more satisfaction than it should.
For a while, only the chapel’s small electric candles move, flickering without heat at the front of the room. Marisol looks at them as if there is an answer hidden in the cheap plastic light. Then she exhales and turns fully on the pew, facing me with Reva’s eyes and a dead woman’s grief.
“After the house, Isabel had Delia,” she says.
The anger in me quiets enough to listen.
“Cal had Reva?”
“Cal had a way out. Deacon made one.” Her voice stays careful, though every word has a bruise beneath it.
“There were minutes, maybe less, where everything depended on movement and lies. Deacon made Isabel believe the order had been carried out long enough for Cal to take Reva north. Isabel did not know Reva lived.”
“And you?”
“I had Delia.”
The words are simple, but they feel anything but.
Marisol looks down at her hands. “I could go with Cal and Reva. Disappear if the lie held. Hold one daughter and abandon the other to Isabel completely. Or I could stay where Isabel could see me, keep some small place near Delia, soften what I was able to, turn a punishment aside when I had enough leverage, teach her how to survive the rooms I wasn’t allowed to enter. ”
Her voice thins, then steadies by force.
“I chose the child who had no Cal.”
I look toward the door because the sentence makes the choice she made feel too small, and that choice was…everything. For all of them. It was the impossible choice.
Stay, and deny herself a life with Reva.
Go with Reva, and deny herself a life with Delia.
If she had stayed with Reva, Reva would have been safe and happy, and so would she. And Cal…obviously there was something between them. Had it always been there, those feelings, that sentiment?
But Delia…if she had stayed with Reva, Delia would have been left to Isabel’s not-so-tender mercies. Maybe she’d have been fine; maybe…probably…not.
A shudder moves through me at the thought of Delia suffering Isabel’s ‘correction’ for the past fifteen years without the softness of her mother there to balance it, to ease it somewhat.
“She thinks you chose Isabel,” I say.
“I chose the child I thought needed me the most. And I’m so sorry for it—”
“She hates that,” I tell her. “The apology. The words that make it sound like you’ve already had time to forgive yourself for what she just learned.”
Her face crumples in one small place before she gathers it back. “I haven’t forgiven myself.”
“Good. Don’t start tonight.”
A sad breath leaves her. It could be a laugh in another life. “Cal said you were kind.”
“Cal lies when he likes people.”
“No. He was very specific about your particular defects.”
I snort. That almost gets me.
I look at the cross at the front of the chapel to keep from getting misty. “Where does Deacon fit?”
Marisol’s expression changes at his name. Respect. Guilt. Fear for him, maybe.
“Deacon stayed close enough to Isabel to know when she doubted the story,” she says. “He carried messages between me and Cal when he could. Not often. Not safely. Never directly enough to expose Reva. He protected the lie because the lie was the only reason she grew up.”
“And Cal?”
“Cal raised her.” Her voice breaks on that one, and she lets it. “He sent pieces when he could. Proof of life, never place. A school photo with the background cut away. A note in code through Deacon. Once, a drawing Reva made of a cat in a crown.”
I swallow hard and decide to be angry about something else for a second.
“Cal loved you,” I say.
Marisol’s fingers twist together. “And I loved him.”
The past tense is a wound. I hear it. She hears it too.
“He is not dead yet.”
“No.” She wipes beneath one eye with her fingertip. “He’s not; you’re right.”
A phone vibrates in her coat pocket. The change is immediate.
Her shoulders go tight. Her face wipes clean. In the space of a breath, Reva’s mother disappears behind the woman Isabel trained to survive being watched. She takes the phone, checks the screen, and stands.
“I have to go before they know I’m gone.”
I step into the aisle. “Will you be safe?”
“No one’s safe.”
“That’s a dodge.”
“It’s the only answer I have.”
I move closer, lowering my voice. “She’s angry now. Reva. Angry enough to burn the whole city down and stubborn enough to bring the matches to do it.” My throat tightens. “But if she loses you twice, it will break something I don’t know how to fix.”
Marisol closes her eyes.
When she opens them, tears shine but don’t fall. “I’ll be okay.”
“That sounds like a lie.”
“It’s a promise to do my best.”
I can accept that because I’ve made worse promises with less truth in them.
She slips the phone into her pocket and looks toward the door, then back at me. “I would like to see them. Both of them. When they’re ready.”
“They decide when that is.”
She gives a short nod. “I understand.”
“I’ll make sure the door exists,” I say. “I won’t shove either one of them through it.”
Her face softens with such raw gratitude that I have to look away for a second.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. Delia may throw a knife, and Reva has men who will help her hide the body.”
For the first time, a fragile smile touches her mouth.
Marisol moves past me toward the chapel door. At the threshold, she stops without turning. “Tell Cal I came.”
“I will.”
“And tell him…” Her voice fails. She steadies it. “Tell him I am holding him to his promise.”
Then she leaves.
I wait thirty seconds before following, long enough that no one watching the hall will tie us too neatly together. When I step back into the ICU corridor, she is gone, swallowed by the hospital and whatever leash Isabel still has wrapped around her life.
Deacon stands outside Cal’s room. He looks at me once and knows.
Inside the room, Reva sits beside Cal’s bed with his hand in hers, head bowed, shoulders curved around grief she has not decided how to carry yet. She doesn’t look broken, though.
She looks like a woman whose whole past has shifted beneath her feet and left her standing anyway.
I go in quietly and take the chair on the other side of the bed.
Reva does not lift her head. “Where did you go?”
“To find answers.”
Her fingers tighten around Cal’s.
“Did you find them?”
I look at Deacon in the doorway, at Cal breathing between us, at the girl I love and the impossible road opening in front of her.
“A few,” I say.
“Are they bad?”
I reach across the bed and cover her free hand with mine. “They’re not simple.”
She lets out a small, tired sound that might have been a laugh if there had been more of her available for it.
“Nothing ever is,” she whispers.
No. It never is. But it’s figure-out-able.
I sit with her until the machine breathes again.