Page 1 of Echo: Burn
PROLOGUE
WILLA
Chicago, Illinois
Six Years Ago
I stand in the hospital parking garage, keys in one hand, a bag containing everything important to me, including all the legal paperwork to start over in the other. My hand trembles despite my best effort to steady it, not from fear but from rage so pure it burns hotter than the fluorescent lights overhead. Jack taught me apologies and protestations of love don’t stop fists.
My scrubs lie crumpled in the trash can beside my Honda, still damp with his spit from when he cornered me in the supply closet three hours ago. They smell like fear and antiseptic. I'll never wear them again. Nursing school, trauma rotation at one of Chicago's best hospitals, the head nurse position they'd promised me next year—all of it dies here tonight in this concrete tomb that echoes with every footstep like a countdown.
Bruises on my ribs throb with each breath, a reminder of what happens when you trust the wrong person. When you believe love can fix broken things. When you think saying "I loveyou" means something more than giving a monster legal access to your life.
Montana. The word tastes like freedom and fear in equal measure. Dad's old Marine buddy runs a veterinary practice in a resort town nestled close to the Rockies. Whitefish. Sounds like the kind of place where you can disappear, where monsters don't follow, and where you can make a new life.
I touch the swelling on my jaw, feeling the shape of Jack's rage impressed into my skin like a signature. He said he'd find me. He always says that. The words have become routine, like breathing or bleeding—just another part of the rhythm of our relationship. But tonight something shifted. Tonight I saw it in his eyes, that final escalation from control to annihilation. Tonight I understood that the next time he puts his hands on me, I won't walk away.
My car starts on the third try, engine coughing to life like it knows we're both running on borrowed time. I adjust the rearview mirror and catch my reflection—split lip, bruise blooming purple across my cheekbone, eyes that have seen too much and still haven't learned to look away. I used to believe in saving everyone. Now I know some people can't be saved—only escaped.
Dad trained me for this, though he never knew it. Weekend shooting lessons that made Mom nervous. Self-defense courses he insisted on before I left for college. Marine Corps discipline that bled into every aspect of his parenting—situational awareness, threat assessment, always have an exit strategy. I thought he was being paranoid. Turns out he was being prophetic.
My phone buzzes with another text. I don't need to look to know it's Jack. Apologies mixed with threats mixed with promises that this time will be different. A pattern as familiar as my own heartbeat. I power the phone off and toss it into thepassenger seat. Let him send messages into the void. Let him rage at silence.
The parking garage exit looms ahead, gate arm raised like a bridge to somewhere else. Once I cross that threshold, there's no coming back. No reconciliation, no second chances, no believing his tears when he swears he'll change. The promised head nurse position disappears. My nursing career in Chicago evaporates. Every friend or colleague who took his side—and there were so many, because Jack is charming when he wants to be—becomes a ghost in my past.
But I'll be alive.
That thought steadies my hands on the wheel. I'll be alive, and that's worth more than any career, any reputation, any life built on the foundation of someone else's violence.
I guide the Honda through the exit, tires squealing slightly on the smooth concrete. Night air hits my face through the cracked window—cold, clean, carrying the promise of November snow. Chicago spreads out before me, city lights glittering like false stars. Somewhere in that urban sprawl, Jack is probably calling my supervisor, my friends, anyone who'll listen to his version of events. His version where I'm unstable, dramatic, overreacting to a simple disagreement.
No one will believe that a successful cardiologist beats his girlfriend. Jack wears respectability like armor. The hospital board loves him. Patients request him by name. He volunteers at free clinics and mentors medical students with patience and grace. How could such a good man possibly be a monster?
But monsters rarely look like monsters. They look like the man you love despite knowing what they really are. They look like love until you're too deep to swim back to shore.
The entrance to the highway appears on my right. Interstate 90 West—the road that leads away from everything I've known. Montana is two thousand miles and a lifetime away. Twothousand miles to outrun the memory of his hands around my throat. A lifetime to forget the moment I realized he might actually kill me.
I pull off at the first truck stop, a fluorescent oasis in the Wisconsin darkness. While the pump clicks through gallons, I watch a garbage truck rumble through the lot, its compactor grinding through the night's refuse. The driver disappears into the convenience store for coffee.
My phone goes into an empty Styrofoam cup from someone's discarded meal. I walk it over to the dumpster behind the truck, casual as throwing away trash, and toss it into the open hopper. By morning, my phone will be halfway to some landfill in Ohio, pinging cell towers east while I drive west. Let Jack track that signal. Let him follow ghosts.
Inside, the clerk barely looks up when I pay cash for a prepaid phone still in its plastic shell. No ID required. No questions asked. This is truck stop country—people disappear and reappear here all the time, and nobody cares enough to wonder why.
I merge into sparse late-night traffic, joining the flow of red taillights heading west. My new phone sits on the passenger seat—useless against whoever's out there. But tucked in my purse on the seat beside me is something far more reliable: Dad's old Glock, cleaned and loaded with two extra magazines. He gave it to me right before he left for his last tour and insisted I learn to shoot it properly.
"Some situations can't be de-escalated, Willa," he'd said with that Marine Corps certainty that brooked no argument. "When violence finds you, you either meet it or you die. Preferably, you meet it first."
I've met Jack's violence a dozen times, always believing the next time would be different. Always thinking I could manage it, control it, love him into changing. Training to be a nurse taughtme to recognize symptoms and understand what needs to be done. But you can't cure what refuses to be healed. You can't fix what's fundamentally broken.
So I'm done trying to save him. Now I'm saving myself.
Cities pass by in a blur of taillights and exit signs. Each mile feels like shedding skin, leaving behind the version of myself that believed in fairy tale endings and the redemptive power of forgiveness. That woman died tonight in a supply closet, suffocated by hands that once held her gently.
I'm someone harder now. Someone who understands that survival sometimes means running, and running isn't cowardice—it can be a tactical retreat. Dad would approve. He always said discretion is the better part of valor, though he'd probably also say I should have left years ago, the first time Jack's temper showed teeth.
I can't rewrite my mistakes. I can only stop making the same ones.
Montana better be ready for me. Because I'm done running scared. I'm done apologizing for taking up space, for speaking too loud, for existing in ways that trigger rage in broken men. Done shrinking myself to fit into someone else's idea of acceptable.
