MULBERRIES
est.1951
Her stomach tightened so sharply she had to lift her foot off the accelerator.
She coasted to a stop a little way down the street, the car idling quietly.
For several seconds—long, stretched, humming—she didn’t move.
The house looked… wrong.
Not physically.Not in any obvious way.But wrong in the way a still pond felt wrong just before a thunderstorm.A pressure in the air.A subtle tilt in the atmosphere.A sense of anticipation so fine it barely existed and yet she felt it like a prickle on the inside of her skin.
As if the house were watching her.
As if it had been waiting.
She gripped the wheel so tightly her knuckles whitened.
“You don’t have to do this,” she told herself.
But she did.
Because ever since this morning—no, ever since Cox’s eyes had fixed on hers through the glass partition—some part of her had known, with that cold, quiet, intuitive certainty she hated, that she would end up here.
Here, at the intersection of past and threat.
Here, where she least wanted to be.
She put the car in park.Sat back.Closed her eyes.
In her mind, her phone buzzed again.Even silently, the guilt was deafening.
Her mother would be sick with worry.
Marcus would probably be halfway through the stages of grief.
Winters would be writing her termination report in bullet points.
But the pull was stronger than all of that.
Kate opened her eyes.
The house waited.Sunlight caught the porch railings, the windows, the brass doorknob.Everything gleamed, surface-level serene.
A lie.
Because she felt it now—not dread exactly, but recognition.
Something had happened here.Something recent.
Something connected to her.
She knew that without knowing why.
Her heart thudded hard enough to painful.
She reached for her phone, flipped it over, and stared at the stack of missed calls stacking like panicked breadcrumbs:
