My sister called at 12:08 in the morning, and I almost let it go to voicemail. Caleb was asleep beside me, turned toward the wall the way he always slept, one arm extended past his pillow as if reaching for something he had not found. Rain moved against the bedroom windows in steady waves.
The baby monitor on my nightstand glowed its steady green, casting the only light in the room, and Noah’s nursery was empty because he was spending the weekend with Caleb’s parents in Fredericksburg. That was the only reason I had managed to sleep at all. Three nights of actual sleep, the kind that reached the bottom and came back up feeling like something had been restored.
When Mara’s name appeared on the screen, I sat up immediately. My sister was an FBI agent stationed out of the Washington field office. She had been for eleven years.
She did not call after midnight unless someone had died or something was about to. “Mara?” I kept my voice low. “Listen to me.” Her voice had the quality it got when she was working, compressed and precise, every word measured.
“Turn everything off. The lights, your phone display, everything. Go to the attic and lock the door.
Do not tell Caleb.”
The chill that moved through me was not from the air conditioning. “What are you talking about?”
“Right now, Elise.”
I looked at my husband. His breathing was slow and even.
Six years of watching him sleep and I knew the rhythm of it better than I knew my own. “You’re frightening me,” I whispered. Her voice cracked into a shout so sharp and sudden I nearly dropped the phone.
“Just do it.”
I moved before I could think about moving. I slid out from under the covers and grabbed my phone charger from the nightstand without understanding why, some instinct about not being without power for whatever was coming. I crossed to the hallway in my bare feet.
Behind me, Caleb shifted. “Elise?”
My whole body seized. “Getting water,” I said.
He made a sound that was not quite a word and went quiet again. I turned off the hallway light. Then the kitchen.
Then the living room lamp that Caleb always left on, a habit he claimed was for safety, that warm amber glow I had always found reassuring. My hands were shaking badly enough that I bumped the lamp shade and stood there for a moment, terrified the sound had carried. Mara was still on the line.
The story doesn’t end here – it continues on the next page.
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