You don’t expect someone to bang on your front door a little after midnight when you’ve spent the evening doing absolutely nothing dramatic.
I was in sweatpants, sitting on the corner of my couch with a laptop perched on my knees, staring at a spreadsheet that refused to balance. The living room smelled faintly like boxed brownie mix and vanilla, because I’d made a pan after dinner as a bribe for myself—one more weeknight, one more set of numbers, one more attempt to feel like I had some control over anything.
Outside, our cul-de-sac was dead quiet the way suburban streets get after eleven: porch lights glowing soft, a distant hum of someone’s HVAC, the occasional car whooshing by on the main road like it had better places to be. My neighbor across the street had left his trash bins out again. Someone’s inflatable holiday decoration down the block leaned at a tired angle like it was giving up on life. Normal. Boring. Safe.
Lily had gone to bed an hour earlier. I’d heard her bedroom door click shut, and then the soft thump of whatever playlist she falls asleep to these days—something with a beat that sounds like a heartbeat under a blanket. She’d called out goodnight, and I’d called it back, and that was it. A regular Thursday night in our Columbus-area suburb, the kind of night you don’t remember.
So when the doorbell rang once, then again, then came the knock hard enough that I actually jumped, my first thought was a delivery screwup. A neighbor who needed something. A wrong address.
Not two uniformed officers on my porch with that we’d-rather-be-anywhere-else expression.
I opened the door halfway, the chain still on because I’m not naïve, even if I like to pretend I’m calm. The porch light hit their badges and the edges of their clipboards. They weren’t aggressive. They weren’t smiling. They looked tired, like they’d been pulling up to doors like mine all night.
“Ma’am—Aaron,” the taller one said, checking his clipboard like he wasn’t sure how to pronounce my very basic name. “Aaron Collins?”
“Yeah,” I said, and I felt my heart start doing something unpleasant behind my ribs. “Is everything okay?”
They didn’t answer that. They never do in movies either, I noticed. It’s always the pause. Always the space where your imagination runs ahead of them.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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