Chapter 5 - The Absent Mother
Derek walked beside the stretcher as the paramedics wheeled Noah out through the shattered front door, his broad shoulders tense under his jacket.
“I’m following the ambulance in my truck,” Derek muttered quietly, stepping close to me as we crossed the threshold into the humid afternoon air. “I already called Dad. And… I tried calling Lena.”
My stomach dropped lower than it had all day. Throughout the entire nightmare—the phone call, the frantic drive, the police, the paramedics—not once had my wife’s name crossed my lips except as a distant reference.
“Did she answer?” I asked, my voice dangerously thin.
Derek shook his head, his expression grim. “Straight to voicemail. Three times. I left a message telling her our son was in an ambulance heading to Northwestern with a broken arm.”
“She knew,” I whispered, the brutal reality finally settling into my bones like frozen lead. “She left him alone with him. She’s been doing it for weeks while I was stuck at the office.”
“We’ll deal with her when we get to the hospital,” Derek said, his hand resting heavily on my shoulder, a solid anchor in a world that was rapidly tearing apart at the seams. “Right now, Noah is what matters.”
We reached the back of the ambulance. The paramedics lifted the stretcher inside, securing the locks with a sharp, metallic click that echoed like a gunshot in the driveway.
I climbed in after Noah, taking my seat on the narrow bench beside his head and immediately taking his hand again.
“You’re going to be okay, buddy,” I whispered, kissing his knuckles as the ambulance doors slammed shut, plunging the interior into a dim, amber-lit sanctuary.
The driver threw the vehicle into gear, and the siren wailed to life, cutting through the afternoon traffic as we lurched forward toward the highway.
Through the small rectangular rear window, I watched Derek’s black truck pull out right behind us, his headlights cutting through the shadows.
We had escaped the house, but as the ambulance accelerated into the stream of city traffic, my phone buzzed violently in my pocket with a new text message.
May you like
I pulled it out with my free hand. It was an unknown number, accompanied by a single photograph taken from across the street of our house just five minutes after the police arrived.
The text read: You think arresting Travis fixes this? You don't even know what your wife was helping him smuggle through your shipping accounts.
