He steps closer and places his hands on my shoulders before kissing my forehead. “Want me to grab bagels and lox from Fortino’s?” he asks, naming the deli he always passes on his route.
“Sure. That sounds good.” I rise onto my toes and catch his mouth in a quick kiss. “I love you. Thank you for taking care of me.”
“My pleasure, beautiful.” His eyes soften, warming in that familiar way that always sends a quiet rush through me.
“I’m so lucky you’re mine,” I say, smiling despite everything. “The day we met changed my life.”
He gives me that crooked grin I fell for years ago. “I’m the lucky one, baby.”
His lips brush mine once more, tender and unhurried, and then he’s gone, leaving me standing alone in the bedroom with the faint smell of him still lingering in the air.
For a long moment I don’t move.
It’s just me now. Me, the echo of the nightmare still clinging to my skin, and the knowledge that there is a loaded gun in the closet I never knew existed.
I love my husband.
I know I do.
But as I stand there in the quiet, with the morning barely begun and my nerves still jangling from sleep and fear, I can’t shake the awful feeling that trust is becoming a luxury I can no longer afford.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The clock on the bedside table reads 2:17 AM, its red digits bleeding softly into the dark, casting a low, unnatural glow across the room. I’ve been awake for hours, Whitney’s journal resting open on my lap, the pages splayed like something fragile and dangerous at the same time. My eyes ache from reading, the words beginning to blur at the edges, but I can’t stop. Her voice is too close now, too present, threading through my thoughts as if she’s sitting beside me, urging me forward, urging me not to look away.
A sound cuts through the silence.
It’s faint, barely there, but it’s enough.
I still, my breath catching as I listen, every sense sharpening at once. For a moment, I convince myself it’s nothing. The house settling. The wind brushing against the windows. Something ordinary, something explainable. But then it comes again, louder this time, a slow, deliberate creak that doesn’t belong to the rhythm of the house.
My fingers hover over the page, my body locked between instinct and reason. I’ve been on edge for weeks, stretched thin by everything I’ve uncovered, every piece of Whitney’s life thatrefuses to stay buried. I tell myself I’m being paranoid, that grief is warping my sense of reality.
But something in me knows better.
The house is too quiet.
Too still.
I slip out of bed, the hardwood cold beneath my bare feet, grounding and sharp. I don’t turn on the lights. The darkness feels safer somehow, like it can hide me just as easily as it hides whatever might be waiting.
The sound comes again.
Closer.
From the direction of the front door.
My pulse kicks hard against my ribs as I move down the hallway, slow and careful, the journal still clutched in my hand as if it could offer protection, as if Whitney’s words might somehow shield me from what’s waiting on the other side.
When I reach the entryway, I stop.
Listen.
Nothing.
Just silence pressing in, thick and suffocating.
Go back to bed, I tell myself. You’re imagining things.
