The hospital called me before midnight — but my mother's reaction told me the truth was far worse than the news.

The dial tone buzzed in my ear like a nest of hornets, but I couldn't take my eyes off the glass.

Out in the hallway, Marsh was still talking to Agent Ruiz. He gestured with his right hand, and the silver snake ring caught the fluorescent light one more time before he slid his hand casually into his coat pocket.

There was another man with a silver ring shaped like a snake.

Ethan's words tore straight through the fragile calm I'd spent two days building. The man who'd worked the Grace Alvarez case. The man who'd sat with me in the waiting room and handed me tissues. The man who'd walked the federal agents right up to my mother's ledger.

He hadn't been solving anything. He'd been managing the damage. Clearing the scene. Collecting what needed collecting.

Cold panic flooded through me, but I forced my face to go blank. If Marsh looked through that glass and saw the fear in my eyes, it was over.

I set the phone down on the tray table with a shaking hand and leaned over Ethan. His chest rose and fell, slow and healing. I couldn't carry him out of here — he was still hooked to an IV and a heart monitor. If I pulled the leads, every alarm at the nurses' station would start screaming.

The door handle clicked.

I spun around, my heart hammering.

Marsh walked in alone, wearing that same tired, sympathetic mask he'd had on for days. "Rachel," he said quietly, so he wouldn't wake Ethan. "Ruiz and the rest of the team are heading back to the field office to log everything from your apartment. I told them I'd stay here and keep an eye on the two of you."

"Thank you," I managed. My voice came out as a choked whisper, which worked in my favor. "I don't know what I'd do without you, Marsh."

He gave me a sad, gentle smile. A wolf wearing wool. "Just doing my job. Why don't you go grab a coffee? You look like you're about to fall over. I'll sit right here by the bed."

He wants me out of this room.

"Actually," I said, forcing a weak, worn-out smile as I got to my feet, "I think I'll just run down to the restroom and splash some water on my face. Two minutes."

"Take your time," Marsh said, stepping aside to let me pass.

Walking by him, my skin crawled. I could smell stale coffee and wintergreen mints on his breath. I kept my eyes locked on the door and stepped out into the bright, sterile ICU hallway.

The second the heavy door clicked shut behind me, I didn't go to the restroom.

I ran for the nurses' station.

Talia looked up from her monitor, her forehead creasing at the sight of my white, sweating face. "Rachel? What's wrong? Is it Ethan?"

"Talia, listen to me, very carefully." I grabbed the edge of the desk so hard my knuckles went white. "The detective in Ethan's room. He is not safe. He's connected to the people who did this to my son. I need you to call security right now. And call the federal agents — Agent Ruiz. Tell her Marsh is compromised."

Talia's eyes went wide. She looked past me toward the room, then back at my face. She didn't hesitate. She grabbed the desk phone and punched in a three-digit extension. "Security, this is ICU Pod 3, I've got an emergency—"

A high, unbroken tone cut through the ward.

My stomach dropped. The flatline alarm.

Ethan.

"Ethan!" I screamed, and I was already running.

I threw my whole body against the door and burst into the room. It was chaos. The heart monitor was putting out one long, flat, screaming note. Ethan's eyes were wide open and rolled back, his little body convulsing against the mattress.

Marsh was standing over him, his hand wrapped around a syringe that was already pushed all the way down into the IV line.

"What did you do?!" I screamed, and I lunged at him.

He turned, and the sympathetic mask was completely gone — nothing left behind it but a flat, dead emptiness. He caught both my wrists with terrifying strength and threw me into the wall. I hit the floor with the air knocked out of me, but the adrenaline kept me moving.

"He saw the list, Rachel," Marsh said, his voice drained of everything human 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. Everybody got sloppy. And the network does not tolerate sloppy."

"He's a child!" I sobbed, dragging myself up as the flatline tone screamed on.

"He's a liability," Marsh corrected, cold. "And unfortunately, so are you now." He drew a compact pistol from under his jacket. "It's a shame. You really were the best of the first batch."

Before he could bring the gun up, the door flew open and two hospital security guards rushed in.

Marsh didn't hesitate. He fired twice — two deafening cracks in that small room — and both guards went down in the doorway.

In the chaos I got to my feet and threw all my weight into his back, clawing at his face, biting down on his shoulder, anything to keep him away from my son.

He roared and slammed himself backward into the wall to crush me against it. The impact shattered the glass partition behind us, and shards rained down across the tile. We tumbled out into the hallway just as the fire alarms started to shriek — somebody on staff had pulled one.

Marsh rolled over. His face was bleeding where I'd raked it. He brought the gun up and aimed it right between my eyes.

"Goodbye, Rachel."

BANG.

The shot cracked down the corridor, and I felt no pain.

Marsh's eyes went wide with shock. A small dark hole opened in the center of his chest. The gun slid out of his fingers and clattered onto the bloody tile, and he pitched forward and didn't move again.

At the far end of the hallway stood a woman in a heavy dark coat, a smoking pistol in her hand. Her hair was matted and her face was gaunt, but she was standing perfectly straight. She lowered the gun. Her eyes locked onto mine for a fraction of a second.

It was the girl from the missing posters. The voice from the phone.

Grace Alvarez.

"Get your son," she said, her voice carrying over the alarms. "The feds are five minutes out. But they're not all on your side either. Run."

She turned and disappeared into the emergency stairwell before I could pull in a breath.

"Doctor! Nurse! Help him!" I screamed, crawling back into the wrecked room on my hands and knees.

Talia and a frantic pediatric team pushed past the fallen guards and swarmed the bed. They rammed a crash cart against the frame — epinephrine, a bag over his mouth, everything they had against the poison Marsh had pushed into his veins.

"Come on, buddy," the doctor muttered, hands pumping his little chest. "Come back to us."

I grabbed Ethan's cold foot and pressed my forehead to it and begged whatever was listening. Take me. Take my life, take my memory, take all of it. Just let him live.

The monitor crackled. One ragged blip broke the flat tone. Then another. Then a steady, thumping rhythm.

"We've got a pulse," Talia breathed, wiping her forehead. "He's stable. Oh my God, he's stable."

I sank to my knees in the broken glass and cried until my chest ached.

Three days later, Ethan was cleared to travel.

We didn't go back to the apartment in Houston. We didn't return the calls from the federal agents or the texts from terrified relatives. With help from a social worker who knew as well as I did that the system was compromised, Ethan and I disappeared into the wet green sprawl of the Pacific Northwest under names that weren't ours.

We live in a small, quiet town now, on the Oregon coast, where the trees are tall and the fog rolls in off the water every morning.

Ethan is healing. The bruises are long gone, replaced by the ordinary scrapes of a six-year-old who plays in the backyard. The nightmares still come, but when he wakes up screaming, I'm always there to hold him until the sun comes up.

I never found the red book. The safe in my closet had been emptied out well before the police ever got there — most likely by the "people above" my mother, whoever they are. I don't know their names. I don't know how deep the roots of that red door really go.

But sometimes, when the wind comes hard off the ocean and pushes against the walls of our new house, I look out the window into the dark line of trees. I think about the photograph of the little girl in the yellow dress. I think about the summer I can't remember.