We drove back to the house again, because apparently my new hobby was walking into my childhood home and feeling my soul shrivel.
Miles went straight to the utility closet where the furnace lived. The closet smelled like dust and metal, like old pennies. He crouched, inspecting the vent pipe.
“It’s not seated right,” he muttered.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means exhaust can leak back into the house,” he said. “But here’s the thing… this doesn’t look like it slipped. It looks like someone loosened it.”
My mouth went dry. “Someone?”
Miles glanced at me. “Jamie, the screws are fresh. See the scratches? Like a screwdriver slipped.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. My hoodie suddenly felt too thin.
We checked the garage. The air was colder there, damp with concrete. My dad’s tools hung neatly on the pegboard, labels still visible. He loved order. Seeing it untouched made me angrier somehow.
Then Miles opened the junk drawer in the kitchen, the one every family has, full of rubber bands and expired coupons and batteries that may or may not be dead.
There, under a pile of random keys, was the missing hallway detector.
Just sitting there.
No batteries.
I stared at it so hard my eyes burned.
“I knew it,” Miles said, voice low. “They removed it.”
“Who is ‘they’?” I whispered, though I already knew the answer my brain was trying not to say.
Miles didn’t respond. He didn’t need to.
Back at the hospital, I went through the bag of my mom’s belongings they’d brought in—her purse, her wallet, her small notebook where she wrote grocery lists in looping cursive. The notebook smelled like her hand lotion, that soft floral scent that always made me think of clean towels.
A folded sticky note fell out.
It was ripped in half, like someone had torn it quickly.
On it, in my mom’s handwriting, were two words:
Don’t trust—
That was it.
My throat closed. My ears rang. Don’t trust who?
I showed Miles. His face tightened. “Did she write this recently?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “But she wouldn’t write something like that for no reason.”
We asked the nurse if we could speak to the detective again.
While we waited, Miles tried something else: he logged into my parents’ doorbell camera account. They’d installed it last year after some packages went missing. My dad liked having “proof,” even if he mostly used it to complain about delivery drivers stepping on his flower bed.
The app loaded slowly, spinning and spinning like it enjoyed torturing me.
Most of the footage from the week before was there—nothing dramatic. A mail carrier. A neighbor’s cat. A delivery guy dropping off a box.
Then… gaps.
Long ones.
“Someone erased clips,” Miles said, voice flat.
I swallowed hard. “Can you restore them?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “If they were deleted recently.”
He tapped through settings, his fingers quick, steady. Watching him work was the only thing keeping me from floating away.
Then the screen flashed.
A restored clip appeared—short, grainy, timestamped two nights before I found my parents.
The video showed the side of the house near the garage.
A figure in a hoodie moved through the frame, head down. They paused at the garage keypad. Their hands moved fast, confident.
The garage door lifted.
The figure stepped inside.
And for half a second, as they turned their head, the porch light caught their profile.
Not enough to see a face clearly.
But enough to recognize the way they walked—like they were always in a hurry, like the world owed them room.
My chest went tight, my vision narrowing.
Because I knew that walk. I’d followed it my whole childhood.
And the worst part was this: if I was right, then my mom’s note wasn’t paranoia. It was a warning she didn’t have time to finish.
So why would someone who had a key… still sneak in like a stranger?
Part 4
I didn’t confront Kara right away. Not because I was noble. Because I was terrified.
There’s a special kind of horror in suspecting your own blood. It makes you feel dirty, like you’re betraying them just by thinking it. And yet, every time Kara spoke, my body reacted like it was hearing something false.
On day five, Kara cornered me by the hospital vending machines. The fluorescent lights turned her skin the color of paper.
“Jamie,” she said softly, “the detective asked me about the will.”
