“Dad… please! Come get me—my husband, he…”
Emily’s voice didn’t just crack; it shattered, a fragile porcelain vessel dropped on concrete. Then, the line went dead.
For a heartbeat that felt like an hour, I sat frozen in the cab of my truck, the phone pressed so hard against my ear that plastic bit into cartilage. I was listening to the emptiness, the terrifying, static-filled void where my daughter’s voice had been seconds ago. I tried calling back—once, twice. Straight to voicemail. A robotic female voice telling me the subscriber was unavailable.
Unavailable. The word tasted like ash.
My hands shook with a violent tremor, a mix of adrenaline and a cold, creeping dread that started in my gut and worked its way out to my fingertips. I dropped my keys twice into the footwell before I finally managed to jam the ignition. The engine roared to life, a stark contrast to the silence on the phone.
Emily lived twenty miles away, a distance that usually meant a thirty-minute scenic drive across two highways and a stretch of winding back road. Tonight, I drove like the speed limits were mere suggestions for other people. I pushed the truck to eighty, weaving through the late-evening traffic, my knuckles white on the steering wheel.
The landscape blurred into streaks of grey and green, but my mind was playing a high-definition horror movie on a loop. I rehearsed every worst-case scenario. I replayed every interaction we’d had over the last six months, searching for the cracks I had been too blind to see. She had been quieter lately. Her bubbly, incessant chatter about her art had dwindled to short, tired sentences. She was always “exhausted,” always covering for Jason with excuses that felt thin and rehearsed.