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.
