I didn’t try to call back. Instinct, honed by twenty years of seeing people on the worst days of their lives, told me that calling back might put a target on her back. I was out of bed and into my jeans in thirty seconds. I grabbed my keys, my wallet, and a heavy flashlight…
Her skin felt clammy, cold despite the stifling heat of the house. Her eyes, usually bright with the spark I remembered from her childhood, were dull and darting. She kept glancing toward the living room, where the rhythmic thump-thump-crack of simulated gunfire echoed from a surround-sound system. “Did you ask him about the crib?” I asked softly,…
His voice cracked, barely more than a hitch of breath in the cold air. “Dad… Mom called me.” I froze. The world didn’t just stop; it tilted on its axis. I crouched down, gripping his small shoulders, trying to anchor him, trying to anchor myself. “Noah, look at me. We talked about this. Mom is…
She was being celebrated as the newly appointed CEO of RevTech Solutions, a position that came with a salary rumored to be half a million dollars and enough stock options to buy a small island. They had invited me specifically—my mother Patricia’s words, not mine—because “it would mean so much to the family to be…
Then my mother, Susan, broke the silence with that familiar, brittle calm she wore like armor. She didn’t rush to me. She didn’t call for a towel. She looked at the broken glass, then at her youngest daughter, and said softly, “Emily’s just stressed about the wedding.” That was the moment it happened. It wasn’t the…
I killed the engine. The silence that followed was heavy, filled with the ghosts of the night I had been exiled from this very driveway ten years ago. It was raining that night. My father had stood on the porch, his face twisted in a mask of betrayed pride, shouting that I was a liar,…
Ruth Whitaker. The matriarch of the coast. The queen of appearances. She stood there in a coral linen dress that cost more than my first car, a strand of pearls resting against her throat like a conqueror’s trophy. She held her glass of chilled rosé not like a drink, but like a gavel she had…
Everything happened suddenly. An accident on a wet highway. The car skidded. The impact. The doctors said she could not be saved. They also said about the baby — that he had died along with his mother. No heartbeat was detected. Now there was only one thing left — to say goodbye to two loved…
The voice on the other end wasn’t the dying wheeze I expected. It was sharp, granular, and commanding—a tone I had never heard from the pensioner living on social security checks and canned soup. “Get home, Sergeant. Now. The squad is assembling. The screening operation commences at 1800 hours.” The line went dead. Why would…
The old woman raised her eyes to me, and I involuntarily shuddered at her strange, piercing gaze. Her eyes were not old at all. They were clear, deep, as if they saw right through me, straight into my soul. The woman was small and fragile, her face furrowed with deep wrinkles, but in those eyes…