Without thinking, I slammed my laptop shut, grabbed my car keys, and sprinted out of the advertising agency without a word to my manager.
The drive from San Diego back to Phoenix usually took hours, but that afternoon, the highway dissolved into a terrifying blur of racing thoughts and white-knuckled panic. The digital dashboard clock ticked forward agonizingly slow as the miles melted away. Every red light felt like a personal insult, every slower vehicle an intentional roadblock. I kept the live feed open on the passenger seat, connected to my car’s Bluetooth, listening to the muffled murmurs of argument echoing through my empty living room.
By the time I pulled my sedan aggressively into our quiet, picture-perfect driveway, my hands were shaking so violently I dropped my keys twice before managing to unlock the front door.
The house was dead silent.
I stepped into the foyer, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. “Brandon?” I called out, my voice cracking with a mixture of terror and boiling rage. “Florence?”
The living room was empty. The rocking chair sat vacant, the afternoon sun casting long, golden stripes across the hardwood floor. But on the coffee table sat something that made my breath catch: a cardboard box I had never seen before, its lid ajar, revealing a stack of old medical journals, prescription pads, and professional identification badges bearing a name and photo I barely recognized.
Footsteps creaked softly overhead, coming from the master hallway toward the nursery.
I moved forward silently, my bare feet making no sound against the carpet. I crept up the stairs, each step groaning under the sudden, heavy weight of realization. The door to Hannah’s nursery was cracked open a few inches. A sliver of amber light spilled out onto the hallway rug.
“…she’s already on her way back, I told you she saw us,” Florence’s hushed, frantic whisper cut through the quiet air. “You packed the wrong box, Brandon. If she opens that garage unit, she’ll see the rest of the equipment from the clinic that got shut down back in Ohio.”
Ohio? Brandon had told me he grew up entirely in Chicago and moved west for college. Another lie. Layer upon layer of carefully constructed fiction designed to hide a man I had never truly known….
