Chapter 11 - A Knock in the Dark
Two months later, the dust had fully settled into a new normal.
Dad had moved into his small one-bedroom apartment near the lumber yard. We had started having breakfast together every Saturday morning at the diner. We didn't talk much about Mom, but our relationship was slowly healing, built on mutual respect rather than Mom’s chaotic demands. Dad had apologized to me—properly, man-to-man—for failing to stand up for me over the years.
Mom, meanwhile, had retreated into total bitterness. She refused to speak to Dad except through her divorce attorney, and she had blocked my number after I declined to attend her solitary Christmas dinner.
I had officially closed on the craftsman house. The keys were in my pocket, the closing documents signed, and my apartment was stacked with labeled moving boxes. In forty-eight hours, I would be waking up in my own home, a property paid for by my own sweat, completely untouched by family guilt.
It was nearly eleven o'clock on a freezing Tuesday night. A light snow had begun falling outside, dusting the parking lot with white powder. I was taping shut the last box of kitchen supplies when a sharp, frantic pounding shook my front door.
I froze, tape gun hovering in mid-air.
It wasn't a hesitant knock like Paige’s two months ago. It was a violent, frantic thumping that rattled the deadbolt in its frame.
*Bang! Bang! Bang!*
"Jake! Jake, open the door! Please!"
It was Marcus.
My heart spiked into my throat. Marcus never lost his cool. He had remained completely composed throughout the entire nightmare of his divorce. For him to be screaming outside my apartment door at eleven on a snowy night meant something had gone catastrophically wrong.
I rushed over, unlocked the deadbolt, and pulled the door open.
Marcus stood under the flickering hallway light, wearing no winter coat, his chest heaving, his face pale with horror. His hands were trembling, and there was a dark, fresh smear of blood across the sleeve of his flannel shirt.
"Marcus? What happened?!" I reached out, grabbing his shoulder. "Are you hurt? Whose blood is that?"
Marcus grabbed my forearms with a grip like steel, his eyes wide, wild, and brimming with uncharacteristic terror.
"Jake... it’s Paige," Marcus choked out, his voice cracking violently in the freezing air. "She’s at the county hospital. The police just found her car overturned in the ravine off Old Mill Road."
May you like
He swallowed hard, looking over his shoulder as if someone were chasing him, then leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a panicked, ragged whisper.
"Jake... she wasn't alone in the car. And the police found something in the trunk that's going to destroy all of us."
