Edmund drives like the road is lava. The speedometer climbs past numbers I should care about and I don't, because my body left this car the second Blythe said those two words and hasn't come back.
"Blythe, listen to me." I press the phone harder against my ear, my voice doing the flat, practised thing it does when the ground disappears. "Stay in the house, don't touch anything, leave every door exactly as it is."
"I'm sorry." Her voice is thin, mechanical, a recording of my sister rather than the girl herself. "Cora, I'm so sorry, I didn't—"
"Stop apologising and start breathing." My free hand grips the edge of the seat until my knuckles ache, mirroring Edmund's grip on the wheel. "Have you called the police?"
"They're here, they asked me questions and I couldn't—I'm sorry." The loop again, sorry sorry sorry, and I don't ask what she's sorry for because whatever it is will keep until I can hold her while she says it.
"We're twenty minutes out, stay on the phone." I look at Edmund. His knuckles are white on the steering wheel, tendons standing like cables, his eyes fixed on the road with the concentrated stillness—like he’s holding himself together by refusing to blink.
Neither of us speaks for the next twelve miles. His jumper is still warm against my skin and the wrongness of that, the obscenity of wearing his clothes while his—mine—our son is missing, makes my stomach fold in half.
We pull into the driveway and the world turns blue. Two police cars, lights spinning, painting the hedges in slow rhythmic strokes that make everything look underwater, and the front door is wide open like a mouth mid-scream.
Edmund is out before the engine dies. He crosses to the nearest officer with a stride that looks controlled from a distance and is anything but—I can see it in the rigid set of his neck, the way his hands open and close before he trusts them to stay still.
"Oliver Hale, three years old, thirty-eight inches, approximately fourteen kilograms." His voice carries across the driveway—measured, every syllable placed with surgical precision. "Sandy brown hair, green eyes, navy duffle coat with wooden toggles."
"He'd be carrying a red toy car—doesn't go anywhere without it." A micro-pause, his thumb pressing hard into his opposite palm. "Crescent birthmark below his left ear—and he talks to strangers without fear, because no one's ever given him a reason not to."
The last sentence costs him something. I watch his composure slip by a single degree—a swallow, a blink that takes too long—before he pulls it back with a steel resolve he’s using to the very last ounce to not come apart on his own driveway.
I go inside. The hallway is bright, every light blazing, and the quiet is the wrong kind—not peaceful but emptied. Oliver's shoes should be by the door, small and crooked, kicked off with the typical childish urgency.
They're not there. His coat hook is bare. The absence is louder than any sound Dennis ever made in Kettleworth.
The kitchen is at the end of the hall, and Blythe is on the floor. Knees pulled to her chest, back against the cabinet, arms wrapped around her shins like she's trying to hold her own body together.
She looks up when I step through the doorway and her face collapses—relief first, then immediately back into the hunted expression of someone bracing to be destroyed. I cross the tiles and lower myself beside her, take her hands, which are shaking so badly that holding them is its own effort.
"Tell me what happened." My voice is steady, which deserves some kind of award given that the space between my lungs has collapsed to the width of a breath I can't quite take.
"Dad called last night." She swallows hard, her throat working visibly. "He wanted the address—said he wanted to send something for me, art supplies, he said he found mum's old pastels."
"And you told him." Not a question. My thumb moves across her knuckle, steady, because one of us has to be.
"I didn't think, Cora, he sounded normal, he sounded like he used to before—" Her fingers tighten around mine until the bones grind. "Oliver was asleep, I checked on him at ten, I checked, he was in his bed with Lightning and his blanket and everything was fine."
The floor is cold through my jeans and my sister is sixteen and shaking because our father reached across sixty miles and took a child from his bed. A different house that was supposed to be far enough away—but nowhere is far enough from Dennis when someone opens the door for him.
"This morning his coat was gone." She's barely whispering. "The front door was open and I didn't hear anything—I was right there, Cora, one floor up, and I didn't hear anything."
Her eyes are begging me to do the thing she's braced for—blame her, confirm the worst version of herself that Dennis spent sixteen years constructing. I can see it in the way her shoulders curve inward, the way she keeps pulling her hands back like she doesn't deserve to be touched.
"Blythe, look at me." She lifts her chin, and her eyes are green and red-rimmed and swimming with something that guts me from sternum to spine.
"This is not your fault." Every word planted, deliberate, the most important sentence I will say today. "Dennis called you, Dennis lied to you, Dennis came into this house while you were sleeping and took a child—that is his choice, his crime, and none of it belongs to you."
Her chin trembles. She nods—mechanical, her body accepting what her brain hasn't processed, the way you nod at a doctor delivering news that hasn't processed yet.
I pull her against my chest and hold my sixteen-year-old sister on a kitchen floor while my son is somewhere I can't reach, taken by the man I spent my entire childhood standing between and everything I loved. The irony would be funny if I could get air past the thing sitting on my lungs.
"Dennis." Edmund's voice from the hallway—not a question, not an exclamation. A single word, flat and precise, spoken by a man who has just rearranged every piece of information he has ever held.
I lift my head. He's standing at the far end of the hall, framed by the open front door and the blue light pulsing behind him. He heard it all—Dennis, the address, the call.
His eyes find mine across the length of the corridor, and I know this look. I've seen it before, in another kitchen, on another night, when he walked through a door in Kettleworth and found my father with a broken bottle and my body between him and Blythe.
The same look. Except that night it was my sister behind me, and the threat had a face I could stand in front of. This time our son is gone, and the silence where Oliver should be presses against every wall in this house.
It fills the hallway, the staircase, the small bed upstairs where a red toy car should be parked on a pillow beside a sleeping boy who talks to strangers because nobody ever taught him not to. Edmund grips the doorframe, and the wood creaks under his fingers, and his mouth opens, and nothing comes out.
To be continued…
P.S. Author’s Note
Dear readers, my biggest thanks to you for spending your precious time with me on this beautiful journey! I hope you liked it as much as I did, and if that’s a yes, I have great news for you—new chapters are coming soon! And believe, it’s gonna get wild…
Thank you again and see you in the next chapters!