The phone buzzed one more time.Buzz-buzz-buzz.A desperate, insistent plea.
She slapped her palm over it, not hard, but hard enough that the vibration stopped.
“Later,” she said aloud, as if to convince the phone.Or herself.
There would be consequences.
Winters would tear strips off her.
Marcus would read her the riot act.
Her mother would—for once in her life—be angry in a way that wasn't just worry in disguise.
And then there was the risk she hadn’t let herself consider fully:
Her job.
She was already on thin ice, whether she wanted to admit it or not.The Bureau wasn’t fond of agents who carried emotional entanglements into active investigations, especially ones linked to cases as notorious as Elijah Cox’s.And now she had ignored protocol.Again.Ignored direct instructions.Ignored the chain of command.Winters would eat her for breakfast.
All because she had felt—what?A pull?A suspicion?A ghost tapping on her shoulder?
She knew full well she could lose everything for this.
She swallowed hard.
But she was already committed.
“Worry about that later,” she murmured.“Later.”
She reached the last turn before Clancy’s Drive far sooner than she wanted.
To her right, she passed the old Forest Lake Bakery—its red awning still hanging crooked after twenty years, the windows fogged with flour dust and childhood nostalgia.She used to walk there on Saturdays for cherry danishes with her father.The memory hit her unexpectedly hard—sharp and tender, like pressing a bruise.
Across the street lay the playground where she’d broken her wrist at nine trying to impress a boy who later moved to Tennessee and never wrote.The swing set was the same, just repainted.The wooden climbing frame sagged a little at one end, softened by seasons.
She drove past the elementary school—now with a solar panel array on the roof, but still with tiny chairs stacked up on the desks—and the corner where the old pharmacy used to be before it turned into a boutique pet spa.The whole town felt unchanged and overhauled all at once, like someone had tried to modernize without disturbing the ghosts.
Her heart thumped harder with every landmark.
You don’t get to escape the place that made you.
No matter how fast you run.
She turned right onto Clancy’s Drive.
Her stomach flipped.
The street was narrower than she remembered.Or maybe she was bigger.Or maybe adulthood had shrunk the dimensions of childhood the way dreams shrank in daylight.Houses perched on deep lots set back from the road, lawns sloping gently toward the curb like green tongues.Trees arched overhead, their branches heavy with leaves that whispered in the passing wake of her car.
She slowed, scanning.
1508.
There it was.
Mulberries.
The house rose from the earth like something grown rather than built—an old Victorian with a roof sloping at a thoughtful angle, the kind of architecture that made you think of rocking chairs and iced tea and safety.The porch railing was painted a warm green.The hydrangeas along the walk were in early bloom, their pale heads bowed like supplicants.There was a new name-plaque: laser-cut, she thought, onto a rhombus of gray slate.Rather ugly.
