It gives you one job and strips the rest of the world down to noise.
The drive should have taken twenty-two minutes.
I made it in fourteen.
I don’t recommend it.
I don’t remember half of it.
I remember the red light at Maple and Third turning green before I was ready.
I remember gripping the wheel so hard my palms hurt.
I remember calling Chloe back three times and getting nothing but silence until the call dropped.
I called Daniel twice.
No answer.
The closer I got to our street, the more ordinary everything looked, and that made it worse.
A man was rolling a trash can back up his driveway.
A yellow school bus was turning the corner two blocks away.
Our mailbox still leaned a little from the snowplow that clipped it last winter.
The small American flag Daniel had tucked into the porch planter for Memorial Day was faded at the edges and tapping softly in the afternoon wind.
The front door was unlocked.
That was the first bad sign.
The second was the smell.
It hit me as soon as I stepped inside.
Not smoke.
Not natural gas.
Something sweet and chemical tucked underneath cinnamon, thick enough to coat the back of my throat.
The house was warm, but not in the normal way.
The air felt artificial.
Heavy.
Like someone had tried to perfume danger and forgotten danger still had weight.
“Chloe!” I screamed.
No answer.
I ran into the kitchen and nearly slipped on broken ceramic.
Daniel was on the floor beside the island, one arm twisted under him, his coffee mug shattered near his hand.
His face looked gray and slack in a way I had never seen, not even when he slept.
Ten feet away, in the doorway to the den, Chloe lay crumpled on her side in her school jacket.
Her pink backpack was still hanging halfway off one shoulder.
For one horrible second, my body tried to turn into stone.
Then I moved.
I dropped beside Chloe first because she was my child, and guilt is not logical when it has a pulse.
Her cheek was warm under my fingers.
Her lashes fluttered.
Her lips parted around shallow, uneven breaths.
“Baby, stay with me,” I said.
