Chapter 1: The Silence   My hands were shaking. I stood in the grand, marble-floored entrance hall of my own home, the front door still open behind me, letting in the cold, wet Greenwich night. My suit, an $8,000 custom-tailored piece, was soaked through. I’d just stepped off a 22-hour flight from Singapore, my mind…

The fluorescent lights of the 5th Precinct substation hummed a dull, Monday-afternoon song. It was the sound of paperwork, stale coffee, and quiet misery. Officer Daniel Morales was rubbing the bridge of his nose, trying to make sense of a vandalism report, when the front door chimed. He didn’t look up. Probably just another noise…

Clara’s story spilled out of her, a torrent of memory held back for decades. She told me about St. Vincent’s Orphanage, an hour upstate. A place of gray walls and cold floors. She was an orphan; he was a mystery. “They called him Daniel,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, her eyes fixed on…

All eyes turned. A woman, so old her back was a question mark, was shuffling down the center aisle. Her knuckles were white on the handle of a four-pronged cane. She was slow, but she was a freight train. You couldn’t have stopped her. She stopped right in front of the judge’s bench. Her name…

The sound of my own blood rushing in my ears was louder than my mom’s first scream. It wasn’t a “spider in the bathtub” scream. It was a raw, terrified shriek that sliced through the morning quiet. It was the kind of sound you hear in movies, right before something terrible happens. And then, the…

Ten years. That’s how long I’d been trapped in that house after burying Lily. Ten years in Maplewood, Tennessee, where the fences stayed broken and the air always smelled like hopelessness. I wasn’t that fragile 8-year-old anymore. At 18, I was quiet, I was strong, and my eyes held a sadness that most people couldn’t…

The last thing I saw before I blacked out was my brother, Daniel, checking his watch. “Just make sure it’s done,” he said, his voice bored, as if he were discussing a late shipment. “And clean up the mess. I’m the sole beneficiary now.” The two men he’d hired nodded. The one holding my head…

I watched him try to process my words. His face, which had been a mask of crisp, corporate exhaustion, was now just… blank. The expensive cut of his suit, the gleam of his watch—it all just melted away. He was a dad. A terrified dad. “The… the doctors,” he stammered, his voice losing its boardroom…

The phone in my hand was black. Silent. Heavier than my backpack. Find your own way home. The words echoed in the sudden, roaring silence of my head. The laughter from the call—Kylie’s, Noah’s, Calvin’s—felt like it was still happening, a tinny, cruel sound buzzing in my ears. The gate agent was still smiling, her…