365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 13

365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 13 – The List

She wouldn’t let go of my hand in the ambulance.

Het her hold it. I want that on the record, because I’d sworn to myself I wouldn’t.

At the hospital, my father came down the corridor at a dead run and stopped six feet short of us like there was glass in the air.

He looked at my mother. He looked at me.

“Go on,” I said. “She’s yours.”

He caught her, and he held onto her, and over her shoulder he looked at me with an expression I have never seen on Marcus Vale’s face in my life.

“Rowan,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Sign the King’s protection order and stop trying to manage my life.”

“Understood, Commander.”

Commander. From my father. Something in my sternum tilted.

Declan was awake by then, and Hudson was out of surgery, and by two in the morning I was standing in a hospital room with six brothers, four of them on their feet and two of them full of morphine, and none of us knowing how to start.

Colton started it.

Colton is the second youngest and has never been able to hold anything in his whole life.

“We made you a binder,” he blurted.

“What?”

He pulled out his phone with a hand that was still shaking and put it in mine.

Photos. Dozens.

A wall in Asher’s office, covered floor to ceiling.

Fabric swatches, indigo and oxblood, pinned in rows with dates. A seating chart. A drawing of a stage in a clearing. A menu, entirely composed of food I like, half of it dishes I’d cooked for the House kitchens myself, which meant somebody had been writing them down.

And in the center, a printed list, six feet long, with a hundred and forty items on it and most of them crossed

off.

ROWAN 18.

At the top, in my mother’s handwriting, from eighteen years ago, faded and taped over three times:

Item 1. She will never doubt for one day that she was wanted.

Item one. Not crossed off.

I stood in a hospital corridor at two in the morning and looked at item one, and I broke.

Not gracefully. Not like a Commander. Like an eighteen-year-old girl who’d eaten breakfast alone two hundred

times.

Asher caught me. Then Fletcher. Then all of them, even Declan reaching out of the bed, and I was in the middle of a pile of enormous idiots who were all crying, and my mother came in and made it worse.

“I have every list,” she said into my hair. “Every color you ever mentioned. Every song. Eighteen years of notebooks, Rowan. I have them all in my desk and I couldn’t open the drawer this whole year because I was so

afraid of what I was doing to you.”

“Then why didn’t you open it,” I said. “Once. Just once, Mom.”

“Because I thought I’d have you afterward,” she whispered. “I thought I had a year to borrow. And you were gone eleven days before I noticed and I will carry that until I die.”

We are not fixed. I want to be honest about that.

You don’t unmake a year in a hospital corridor. There are things I’ll flinch at for the rest of my life – closed

office doors, the phrase not now, the sound of a family talking on their phones at a dinner table.

But at about four a.m., my mother took my hand and said, “Sunday. Just us. Terrible movies and the greasy

diner.”

And I said, “I’m deployed Sunday.”

And she said, “Then the Sunday after.”

And I said, “Yes.”

Twelve times I’d asked her. She’s asked me once, and I said yes, and I’m not sorry.

Jaylen Marek drove me back to the Vanguard at dawn.

Cop Neither of us said anything for forty minutes. Then he said, “You didn’t ask any of us for permission. Not the King. Not Larsen. You just took command of an operation involving your own mother.”

re you writing me up?”

“I’m asking you to have dinner with me.”

I looked at the road for a while.

“There’s an oath,” I said.

“There’s an exception in the oath,” he said. “For a lawful engagement.”

“That’s a hell of a first date to propose.”

“I’m a planner.” He kept his eyes forward, but his ears had gone red, which I found deeply satisfying. “Also I should tell you something before you say yes or no, because you’ll find out at the next council anyway. I’m not just a Commander.”

“I know.”

He nearly put us in a ditch. “You know?”

“You’re the Royal Gamma’s son. You take your father’s post the day Kian marries. Your whole team’s future

Crown staff.” I shrugged. “You’ve all got the same posture and none of you have ever once complained about

the food.”

“Nobody knows that. Nobody knows that.”

“Jaylen.” I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. “I can hear your heartbeat from the

next building. It goes stupid every time I walk into a room. You’ve been the worst-kept secret in my life for six

months.”

Silence.

Then: “…Is it doing it now?”

“It’s been doing it since the hospital.”

He pulled over on an empty road at sunrise, and he kissed me, and I let him, and Echo had the manners to be

extremely quiet for once.

We got back to campus at seven.

There was a black car parked in front of our wing that didn’t belong to anyone at the Vanguard.
And Flora was standing on the steps with a sealed envelope in her hands and a look on her face I did ngyike

at all.

Sommander,” she said. “This came for you an hour ago. Hand delivered.”

The seal was a black wax crest.

House Hallow.

[CHAPTER CONTENT]