Part 13
When Ethan came home that evening, the warmth he usually brought with him seemed to evaporate the moment he saw my face. I hadn't been able to eat, and I hadn't let Chloe out of my sight for a single second. I had even kept the curtains drawn, plunging our usually bright living room into a dim, paranoid twilight.
He closed the door behind him, setting his briefcase down with a soft click. "Emily? What’s wrong? Why are the lights off?"
I didn't say a word. I simply grabbed his hand and led him into the kitchen, where the porcelain music box and the jagged note sat on the counter like a radioactive anomaly. He looked at them, then at me, his eyes instantly shifting from confusion to a deep, protective anger.
He picked up the note, reading the words silently. I watched his jaw clench, a muscle leaping beneath his skin. "How did this get here?"
"It was on the porch this morning," I whispered, my voice cracking. "No mail carrier. Someone walked up our driveway, stood on our porch, and left it there. Ethan, she’s supposed to be in prison. The letter from my mother said she was paralyzed, that she couldn't even walk."
Ethan immediately pulled me into his arms, burying his face in my hair. He was my rock, the solid foundation that kept me anchored to reality when the trauma tried to drag me back out to sea. "Hey, breathe. Look at me, Emily. We don't know if she’s actually here. She could have hired someone online. There are thousands of creepy people who take odd jobs for cash on Craigslist. It’s a scare tactic."
"But she knows where we are," I sobbed into his chest. "We changed our names. We moved across the country. We did everything right, Ethan. How did she find us?"
"I don't know," Ethan admitted, his voice tight but fiercely controlled. "But I'm going to find out. I'm calling Marcus right now."
Marcus was a former classmate of Ethan’s who now worked as a high-end private investigator specializing in corporate security and background checks. Within an hour, Marcus was on the phone, listening to the details of the situation. He promised to run a full check on Madison’s current status in Colorado and to pull any surveillance footage from our neighbors' security cameras to see who had dropped off the package.
That night, sleep was an impossibility. I lay awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling, listening to the rhythmic rise and fall of Ethan’s breathing beside me. Every tiny sound—the house settling, the wind rattling the windowpanes, a car driving down the street—made my heart leap into my throat.
Around three in the morning, a faint, metallic sound echoed through the baby monitor on my nightstand.
It was a soft, winding sound. The mechanical crank of a spring turning.
Then, through the speaker, the tinny, distorted melody of the porcelain music box began to play. It was muffled, coming from the kitchen down the hall, but in the dead silence of the night, it sounded deafening.
I bolted upright, my skin breaking into a cold sweat. I hadn't wound that music box. Ethan hadn't wound it. It had been sitting completely still on the kitchen counter when we went to bed.
May you like
"Ethan," I choked out, shaking his shoulder. "Ethan, wake up. Listen."
He was awake in a second, his eyes alert. He heard the music too. The eerie, childlike tune drifted through the monitor, a slow, mocking melody that filled our bedroom with pure horror. Someone was inside our house.
