“Close.”
I looked toward the hospital room door.
“Why are you calling me?”
“Because your son opened the red door,” she said. “And now they know you remember enough to be dangerous.”
“I don’t remember anything.”
“You will.”
Behind her voice, I heard something faint.
A train horn.
Then she said, “Do not trust Detective Harris.”
My eyes lifted to the glass wall of Noah’s room.
In the hallway outside, Detective Harris stood speaking with Agent Morales.
As if he felt me watching, he turned.
Our eyes met.
On his right hand, catching the cold hospital light, was a silver ring shaped like a snake.
The phone went dead.
The dial tone hummed in my ear like a swarm of hornets, but my eyes remained locked on the glass.
Outside, Detective Harris was still talking to Agent Morales. He gestured with his right hand, the silver snake ring catching the harsh fluorescent light once more before he slid his hand casually into his coat pocket.
He said there was another man with a silver ring shaped like a snake.
Noah’s words echoed in my head, tearing through the fragile peace I had fought so hard to build over the last forty-eight hours. The man who had helped investigate Lily Moreno’s disappearance. The man who had consoled me in the waiting room. The man who had led the federal agents straight to my mother’s ledger.
He hadn’t been solving the case. He had been managing the fallout. Cleaning the crime scene. Retrieving the assets.
A cold, visceral panic flooded my veins, but I forced my face to remain completely blank. If Harris looked through the glass and saw the terror in my eyes, it would be over.
I set the phone down on the bedside table with a trembling hand, then leaned over Noah. His chest rose and fell in a slow, healing rhythm. I couldn’t carry him out of here; he was still hooked up to an IV and a heart monitor. If I pulled the wires, the alarms at the nurse’s station would scream.
The door handled clicked.
I spun around, my heart hammering against my ribs.
Detective Harris walked in alone, his expression wearing that same tired, sympathetic mask he’d worn for days. “Emily,” he said softly, keeping his voice down so as not to wake Noah. “Morales and the rest of the team are heading back to the field office to catalog the evidence from your apartment. I told them I’d stay behind to keep an eye on you two.”
“Thank you,” I managed to say. My voice was a choked whisper, which worked perfectly given the circumstances. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Harris.”
He offered a sad, comforting smile—the smile of a wolf in a sheep’s wool. “Just doing my job. Why don’t you get some coffee? You look like you’re about to collapse. I’ll sit right here by the bed.”
He wants me out of the room.
“Actually,” I said, forcing a faint, exhausted smile as I stood up, “I think I’ll just go to the restroom down the hall to wash my face. I’ll be right back.”
“Take your time,” Harris said, stepping aside to let me pass.
As I walked past him, the proximity made my skin crawl. I could smell the stale coffee and wintergreen mints on his breath. I kept my eyes strictly on the door, stepping out into the sterile, brightly lit ICU hallway.
The moment the heavy wooden door clicked shut behind me, I didn’t go to the restroom. I sprinted toward the nurse’s desk.
Carla, the night nurse who had comforted me before, looked up from her computer, her brow furrowing at the sight of my pale, sweating face. “Emily? What’s wrong? Is it Noah?”
“Carla, listen to me very carefully,” I whispered, grabbing the edge of the desk so hard my knuckles turned white. “The detective in Noah’s room. He’s not safe. He’s connected to the people who hurt my son. I need you to call security right now. And call the federal agents—Agent Morales. Tell her Harris is compromised.”
Carla’s eyes widened. She looked past me toward Noah’s room, then back at me. She didn’t hesitate. She grabbed the desk phone and dialed a three-digit extension. “Security, this is ICU Pod 3. We have an emergency…”
Suddenly, a high-pitched, continuous beep shattered the quiet of the ward.
My stomach plummeted. It was the flatline alarm.
Noah.
“Noah!” I screamed, throwing myself backward and sprinting down the hallway.
I slammed my body against the door to Noah’s room, bursting inside. The room was in chaos. The heart monitor was emitting a solid, agonizing tone. Noah’s eyes were wide open, rolled back, his tiny body seizing violently against the mattress.
Harris was standing over the bed, his hand gripping a syringe that was already pushed flat against Noah’s IV line.
“What did you do?!” I shrieked, lunging at him.
Harris turned, the sympathetic mask entirely gone, replaced by a cold, dead emptiness. He caught my wrists with terrifying strength, throwing me violently against the wall. I hit the floor, the wind knocked out of me, but the adrenaline kept me moving.
“He saw the list, Emily,” Harris said, his voice entirely devoid of emotion as he capped the syringe and dropped it into his pocket. “Your mother was supposed to keep him in line. Daniel was supposed to keep you distracted. But everyone got sloppy. And the network doesn’t tolerate sloppy.”
“He’s a child!” I sobbed, struggling to get my feet under me as the flatline alarm continued to wail.
“He’s a liability,” Harris corrected coldly, drawing a compact pistol from beneath his jacket. “And unfortunately, so are you. It’s a shame. You really were the best of the first batch.”
Before he could raise the weapon, the door flew open. Two hospital security guards burst into the room.
Harris didn’t hesitate. He fired twice, the deafening cracks of the gun exploding in the small room. The guards collapsed into the doorway. In the confusion, I scrambled to my feet and threw my entire weight against Harris’s back, clawing at his face, biting his shoulder—anything to keep him away from my son.
He roared in anger, throwing himself backward against the wall to crush me. The impact shattered the glass partition behind us, sending a shower of sharp shards onto the tiled floor. We tumbled into the hallway just as the fire alarms began to scream, triggered by the hospital staff.
Harris rolled over, his face bleeding where I had scratched him. He raised the gun, aiming straight between my eyes.
“Goodbye, Emily.”
BANG.
The gunshot echoed through the corridor, but I didn’t feel any pain.
Harris’s eyes widened in shock. A small, dark hole bloomed in the center of his chest. The gun slipped from his fingers, clattering onto the bloody tile, and he collapsed forward, lifeless.
Standing at the end of the hallway, holding a smoking pistol, was a woman in a heavy dark coat. Her hair was tangled, her face gaunt, but her posture was rigid. She lowered the gun, her eyes locking onto mine for one fraction of a second.
It was the girl from the missing posters. The girl from the phone call.
Lily Moreno.
“Get your son,” she said, her voice cutting through the blaring alarms. “The feds are five minutes away. But they aren’t all on your side either. Run.”
She turned and vanished down the emergency stairwell before I could even draw a breath.
“Doctor! Nurse! Help him!” I screamed, dragging myself back into the shattered room on my hands and knees.
Carla and a frantic pediatric team pushed past the fallen guards, rushing to Noah’s bedside. They slammed a crash cart against the bed, injecting epinephrine, bagging his lungs, fighting the poison Harris had pumped into his veins.
“Come on, buddy,” the doctor muttered, his hands pumping against Noah’s tiny chest. “Come back.”
I grabbed Noah’s cold foot, pressing my forehead against it, begging whatever god was listening. Take me. Take my life, take my memories, take everything. Just let him live.
The monitor crackled. A erratic blip broke the solid tone. Then another. Then a steady, thumping rhythm.
“We have a pulse,” Carla breathed, wiping sweat from her brow. “He’s stable. Oh my god, he’s stable.”
I sank to my knees among the shattered glass, crying so hard my chest ached.
Three days later, Noah was cleared for transport.
We didn’t go back to the apartment in Dallas. We didn’t answer the calls from the federal agents, or the text messages from terrified relatives. With the help of a sympathetic social worker who knew the system was compromised, Noah and I vanished into the vast, anonymous sprawl of the Pacific Northwest under assumed names.
We live in a small, quiet town now, where the trees are tall and the fog rolls in from the ocean.
Noah is healing. The physical bruises are gone, replaced by the normal scrapes of a six-year-old playing in the backyard. The nightmares still come, but when he wakes up screaming, I am always there to hold him until the sun comes up.
I never found the red book. The safe in my apartment had been cleared out long before the police arrived, likely by the “people above” my mother. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know how deep the roots of the red door go.
But sometimes, when the wind blows hard against our new house, I look out the window into the dark woods. I think of the photograph of myself in the yellow dress. I think of the summer I forgot.
And I know that someday, the past will come looking for the first chosen.
But until that day comes, I will be ready. And I will protect my son.
