Page 20 of Shadows Relived
Lucas, with his stormy eyes and jaw set too tight for a boy his age, was already a master at hiding disappointment. She’d seen it in the way he never flinched when he didn’t get picked first, never cried when someone forgot to show up at a parent lunch. His clothes were always neat, but he flinched sometimes when adults raised their voices, flinched like someone who had been on the wrong end of a belt, or worse. The school counselor had danced around it delicately, claiming there wasn’t enough to open a file, but Meaghan knew. She’d seen the hollow places behind his stubborn defiance.
She didn’t just worry about neglect in Lucas’s house. She worried about addiction in his parents, about thesmells that clung to his backpack, and about the twitch in his hands some mornings. Alcohol. Pills. Maybe both. Maybe more.
And yet here he was, drawing a superhero version of himself with wings and laser eyes, trying so hard to believe in something better.
Sophie, for all her sweetness and sparkling laugh, wore loneliness like a second skin. Her parents were always traveling: business, leisure, both. Sometimes together. Sometimes separately. Never with the kids. It didn’t seem to matter. The longest she’d gone without seeing them in person was three months.
They left her with Kara, a sister still in high school who couldn’t even be bothered to notice Sophie hadn’t come home yesterday. That realization had gutted Meaghan. Not because she expected perfection, but because that kind of indifference was more dangerous than rage. It taught a little girl that her presence was optional.
And still, Sophie smiled. Drew glittering crowns and flower-laced boots for every character. Clung to Meaghan’s side like a shadow, like she was afraid she’d disappear next.
Then there was Willie. Sweet, sensitive Willie, whose curls always needed trimming and whose heart was too big for his small chest. His parents had died in a car crash two years ago. Just… gone. No warning. No goodbye. He’d gone to live with his grandmother, Mrs. Evelyn Davies, who was nearly eighty and had a bad hip, which was just made worse by a fall, but who would still move mountains for that little boy.
She came to every school play, every open house, even the half-days when most parents didn’t bother. She always brought Meaghan banana bread and asked if Willie was doing okay, like it would kill her to miss a single sign that he wasn’t.
And now she was in the hospital. And Willie didn’t even know.
She swallowed the lump in her throat. She couldn’t fix their homes. Couldn’t undo what they’d lost or give them back the childhoods they deserved.
But she could be there now. She could keep them warm. Keep them safe. Keep them coloring superheroes until the crayons broke, and the daylight faded, and there was no more room left for fear.
She could do that.
And for as long as she could, she would.
After about twenty minutes, the coloring devolved into a whispered game of “I Spy,” which was fine by her. She sat by the window, sipping lukewarm coffee from a chipped blue mug, watching the trees sway gently outside.
Her fingers itched to hold her phone, to scroll through news updates, to do something. But Callen had chucked it out the window yesterday, for her own good, he’d said, right before turning off the highway and disappearing down a dirt road like something out of a spy movie.
She was still mad about that.
But she also remembered the gunfire; the way he’d grabbed Willie and shielded him with his own body. The precision in his movements. The steel in his voice. The utter focus.
Callen McHollister had come crashing back into herlife like the wrecking ball he’d always been. Only now, he wasn’t the boy who made her sneak out of debate team meetings to kiss him behind the bleachers. He was a man. Hardened. Carved out of something tougher than time and war. A protector, yes, but also dangerous. Even to her heart.
She thought of his kiss last night: hot and rough and full of all the things they hadn’t said in a decade. Her fingers had fisted his shirt, and she’d felt the thrum of something ancient and unfinished.
And then she’d walked away. Like an idiot.
Because she couldn’t afford to want him. Not now. Not when she didn’t even know what kind of storm her father had pulled her into.
Whathadhe done?
That question burned in her mind every time she tried to breathe.
She wanted to call him. Demand answers. Scream into the receiver like she used to when they fought about college or career choices or dating anyone who didn’t work on Capitol Hill.
But she had no phone, and he had made her promise not to use the satellite phone for anything outside of an emergency.
“They can track your phone,” he had told her as he tossed it. And even though she hated him, she knew he was right. Whoever was after her could use it to get to her father, or worse, track her and hurt the kids. And she hated that he was right.
She hated even more that a part of her was glad he was the one watchingover them.
And God help her, she remembered everything.
That final night before he left for the military had been soaked in the kind of aching, forbidden heat that stayed under your skin for years. She could still feel the rough press of his palm at the small of her back, the way his mouth had whispered her name like a prayer before dragging her under. The way he kissed her like she was the only solid thing in a world already slipping away.
She’d been nineteen. Reckless. Wild with love.
