I called Delaney one last time, gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles turned absolute white. “Pick up,” I hissed at the windshield, swerving around a stalled delivery truck. “Damn it, Delaney, pick up the phone.”
She didn’t.
I blew through a yellow light that had long turned red, my heart in my throat, praying I wasn’t already too late. I turned the final corner onto her street in East Nashville, my eyes scanning the property, and the breath completely left my lungs. The front door was slightly ajar, swinging in the afternoon breeze like an open grave.
Chapter 2: The House Gone Quiet
I made the drive in twenty-two minutes, bumping hard over the curb and throwing the car into park before it had even fully stopped moving.
The front porch looked entirely wrong. No scattered chalk. No discarded plastic tricycles. Just a suffocating, unnatural stillness.
I bolted up the steps, my chest tight enough to snap ribs. “Micah!” I yelled, pushing the door wide open.
The silence inside the house was absolute. It wasn’t the peaceful quiet of sleeping children; it was the heavy, stagnant silence of an abandoned place. It made my stomach free-fall.
Then, I saw him.
Micah was sitting on the living room rug, his knees pulled to his chest, clutching a faded throw pillow like a shield. His blonde hair was matted to the left side of his forehead. His cheeks were streaked with dried dirt and something that looked like dried chocolate. But it was his posture that broke me. His little body carried that unmistakable, horrifying stillness that children take on when they have moved past crying, past hoping, and into pure, instinctual waiting.
He looked up at me, his blue eyes huge and hollow. “I thought maybe you weren’t coming.”
I crossed the room in two massive strides and hit my knees so hard the floorboards groaned. I pulled him into my chest, burying my face in his hair. He smelled like stale sweat and fear. “I’m here, buddy. I’m right here. Where’s your sister?”
Micah didn’t speak. He just pointed a trembling finger toward the sofa.
Three-year-old Elsie lay curled beneath a heavy winter blanket, despite it being a warm spring afternoon. Her face was paper-pale, yet two angry red flags of fever burned on her cheeks. Her lips were cracked, her chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged hitches.
“Elsie,” I breathed, pulling the blanket back.
I pressed my palm to her forehead and jerked it back instinctively. The heat radiating off her skin was terrifying. It felt like touching a radiator. I scooped her up immediately. Her head lolled back against my shoulder with zero resistance, her limbs heavy and entirely limp.w
“We’re leaving. Right now,” I said, forcing a terrifyingly false calm into my voice. “Shoes on, Micah. No questions. You stick right by my leg.”
He scrambled to his feet, almost tripping over his own sneakers. “Is she just sleeping, Dad?”
