I forced myself to start the Tesla and pull out of the garage, feeling both exposed and invisible as I made my way onto the street.
The city was gearing up for the weekend with cyclists weaving through traffic, people in athleisure walking dogs the size of small horses and the usual parade of food trucks and electric scooters. Normalcy, everywhere I looked. I tried to let it wash over me, to pretend for just a second that everything was fine and I was late for a birthday party because I’d lost track of time, not because someone was actively hunting me.
On the drive to my grandparents’ or rather Bailey’s house, now that she’d moved into it with Cole, the walls felt like they were closing in. It passed in a blur. I must have stopped at red lights, and navigated the winding streets and lane changes, but all I could think about was the note, radiating menace like a miniature nuclear device.
My phone chimed periodically with messages from my sisters: ETA? What are you wearing? Can I borrow your Jimmy Choos? I replied to none of them, but reading them made my chest ache. They had no idea. No one did and no one would.
I’d always been a handle-your-shit-on-your-own kind of person. It wasn’t pride, exactly, or even some pathological urge to tough it out—more of a default setting, like the blinking cursor when you open Word. It was just there, always had been always would be no matter what version. But even I had to admit, this was a lot to deal with on my own. The break-ins. The notes.The creeping sense that someone was lurking just out of frame, waiting with the patience of a psychological thriller villain in act one.
And yes, I knew all the advice about reaching out, not letting yourself stew in anxiety, but the one time I’d tried therapy, I spent fifty minutes explaining my family’s emotional division protocol, and the therapist spent the last ten trying to convince me it was okay to not be “the responsible one” all the time.
I didn’t want to burden Bailey or Birdie, they had their own shit, and besides, the more I said this aloud, the more it felt real. I wanted plausible deniability, some mental loophole where I could convince myself that everything was fine if I just didn’t name it. Like Voldemort. Or black mold.
But there was a part of me, a very small voice, that wished I had someone I could talk to. Someone who’d listen and not try to fix it or me, someone who’d just sit there and absorb my freak-out and be completely unbothered by it.
For the first time in a long time, I gave myself permission to miss Adam.
It was strange how his name felt like a hug even now. It’d been years, literal decades, since we’d spoken. Sure, the last time we saw each other was…bad. But before that, he was my best friend. More than a best friend, though I didn’t have the language for it at the time.
Adam had been my only real confidant, the only person who noticed when things got bad with my sisters and grandparents, and the only one who could make me laugh when my world was coming apart at the seams. I spent years trying to rationalize why a six-year-old boy would care about the four-year-old girl he saw sobbing on a porch, but he did. And he continued to care until the day he ran out of that pool house three days before his eighteenth birthday. He cared in a way that was relentless and illogical and, sometimes, inconvenient.
He used to come over after school and help me get the girls to do their homework. He’d invent elaborate scavenger hunts that, in hindsight, were thinly disguised schemes to keep them occupied while I did my own assignments. Sometimes, when the twins were fighting, he’d stage a fake wrestling match to distract them. He was a terrible actor, but the commitment was flawless. He took every punch and every shriek with the patience of a saint.
It was the nights that were the worst. The girls would go to bed, and I’d sit up in my bed, knees to my chest, listening for the sounds of my grandpa’s TV and the distant hum of downtown. Some nights I’d get so down I’d start having what I called the ‘black cloud days,’ where it felt like I was breathing through a pillow and nothing was ever going to get better.
Somehow, Adam always knew. I still have no idea how he figured it out, but those were the nights he’d crawl through my window, holding an ice cream sandwich, and he’d just sit there on the foot of my bed until I started to thaw out. If it had been anyone else, I would have found it mortifying. But with him, it was the only time I didn’t feel like a burden.
For twelve years he was my rock. My everything. Then we kissed, he nearly gives me an orgasm, doesn’t speak to me for three days, leaves town, never speaks to me again.
I always thought I’d hear from him. Especially when my grandparents passed away. I waited. Nothing. And when his dad died of a heart attack, I didn’t reach out. Not because I was angry, but because I didn’t know how to say, “I missed you so much it physically hurt.” Or, “You were the only part of my childhood that didn’t suck.” Or, “You broke my heart, and you didn’t even notice.”
Now, as I pulled up to my grandparents’ house for Carly’s party and saw Adam’s childhood home next door, still empty after his dad’s passing, the paint on the porch peeling and thelawn an overgrown mess, I felt a weird kind of ache. The kind that made me want to walk over and ring the doorbell, just to see if maybe, by some freak of quantum probability, he’d be standing there with an ice cream sandwich and a dumb joke that would make everything okay.
But there was no Adam. No one standing in the doorway. No movement in the shadows, just the tired outline of a house that looked as lonely as I felt.
“Hey! What are you doing? I’ve been texting you!” Bailey called out from the front door.
I glanced down at the note. Whatever it said, it would wait until after the party. The party that was taking place next door to the childhood home of the only man I’d ever loved, whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years.
Today was going to be fun.
4
ADAM
I pulledup to Maddox’s house, excepthousewasn’t the right word for it. The place was a mid-century showpiece that looked like it belonged on the cover of Modern Living Magazine. Two stories, all glass and steel, perched on a sloping lot with a panoramic view that could easily be a Bond villain’s lair.
From the backseat, Joey—the more outgoing of the twins by a decisive margin—pressed her nose to the glass and asked, “Is this our new house?”
She’d posed the same question at the gas station and even a higher-end rest stop. She seemed to be obsessed with the concept of permanence, or maybe she was just tired of driving, and I was reading way too much into every behavior.
I explained, “No, this is my friend Maddox’s house. Remember, I told you that you are gonna play with his daughter while I unpack, and then you’re gonna come to our house later.”
She frowned, which was her default expression for any situation where a question went unresolved to her satisfaction. Andi, on the other hand, was still out cold, curled up like a cat in her booster seat, snoring gently. It would’ve taken a seismic event to wake her. But it was time to do just that.
“Hey, sweetie, it’s time to wake up.” I shook her leg gently.
“Sissy! Wake up!” Joey shouted.
