Rowan Mercer had been halfway through a budget meeting in his Nashville office when his phone lit up with a number he didn’t recognize. For one ordinary second, he almost let it ring out, assuming it was just another vendor trying to reach him before lunch.
Later, that tiny hesitation would haunt him.
He answered distractedly. “Hello?”
For a moment, there was only static and the faint rustle of movement.
Then came a little boy’s voice, thin with fear.
“Dad?”
Rowan was on his feet before his mind fully caught up.
“Micah?” he said. “Why are you calling me from another phone? What happened?”
The boy sniffed hard, trying to hold himself together in the determined, heartbreaking way children do when they’ve already been brave for too long.
“Dad… Elsie won’t wake up right. She keeps sleeping and she feels really hot. Mom isn’t here. We don’t have anything left to eat.”
The room disappeared around Rowan.
The spreadsheets on the screen, the coworkers at the table, the numbers they’d been discussing only seconds earlier—none of it mattered anymore. His chair scraped violently backward as he grabbed his keys and phone and rushed for the elevator.
He called Delaney immediately.
Voicemail.
He called again.
Voicemail.
Again.
Nothing.
By the time he reached the parking garage beneath the building, his pulse was hammering so hard his hands shook on the steering wheel. Earlier that week, Delaney had told him she was taking the kids to stay with a friend at a lake cabin where the phone signal was unreliable. Because they were in the middle of one of their carefully negotiated custody weeks, and because their co-parenting had been tense but manageable for months, he had believed her.
