The taxi smelled faintly of vinyl and peppermint gum, the kind of stale sweetness that clings to upholstery no matter how often it is wiped down. The driver kept the heat too high, and the windows fogged at the edges, turning the neighborhood into a soft blur. I watched familiar streets slide past anyway, recognizing…
Mornings in Blue Springs always start the same way, and I’ve always found comfort in that. The light comes first, thin and pale at the edges of the curtains, as if it’s testing whether I’m awake before it commits to the day. The house creaks in familiar places. The radiator coughs once like an old…
David Mitchell always spoke about “safety” the way people speak about weather: concerned, reasonable, impossible to argue with. That’s what made him effective. If he had come into my kitchen waving red flags, I would have noticed. If he had acted like a man with something to hide, I would have tightened every lock in…
My name is Claire, and being the oldest daughter in my family has always felt like standing in a doorway with my arms stretched wide, holding everyone back from spilling into each other. I learned early how to listen for the tiny shifts in a room. A laugh that went a little too sharp. A…
My name is Robert Sullivan. I’m sixty-four, and I used to believe that if you loved your child hard enough, long enough, you could shape the kind of man he became. That belief had carried me through the hardest years. It had kept me upright at gravesides and in hospital corridors. It had been the…