Chapter 2 - Fourteen Years of SilenceThe recovery ward was dim, illuminated only by the pale green glow of the monitor tracking Caesar’s heart rate. Jen sat at her desk across the room, aggressively typing up surgical notes while Nick sat on a plastic folding chair beside the dog's kennel, his long legs stretched out, a cup of lukewarm black coffee in his hand that Jerry had somehow procured from an all-night diner three blocks away.
"Fourteen years," Nick broke the silence, his voice barely cutting above the hum of the air purifier. "You went to Cornell. Graduated top of your class. Opened this place in 2018."
Jen stopped typing. She spun her chair around to face him, her eyes flashing. "You've been keeping tabs on me?"
"I keep tabs on everything in this borough, Jen. Especially the things that matter."
"Don't do that," she said, her voice shaking slightly with a mixture of grief and long-suppressed fury. "Don't come in here looking like a mob movie extra, talking about matters after you vanished into thin air on a Tuesday afternoon in 2012. No note. No warning. Just a unlocked back door and a rumor that your uncle had dragged you south before the feds could piece together what your father left behind."
Nick set the coffee cup down on the floor. He didn't look away. "My father left a debt written in blood, Jen. The people he owed didn't care about a sixteen-year-old kid with a crush on the girl next door. They wanted collateral. They wanted us dead. If I had stayed, the first place they would have looked to hurt me was you."
"So you let me think you were dead?" Jen's voice cracked, the raw memory of weeks spent crying into her bedroom pillow rushing back with the force of a tidal wave. "My first kiss, Nick. You kissed me behind the bleachers, told me you'd call me that night, and then you just... evaporated."
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"It was protect you or destroy you," he said softly, standing up. He took a step toward her desk, his shadow falling over her like a shroud. "I chose the only option that kept you breathing. And every single day since then, I've lived with the consequence of walking away."
Before Jen could fire back a blistering response, the front door chimes jangled with frantic, violent urgency.
