Slay Team, No Jade
At 6:18 in the morning, the house was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator breathing. No texts, no knock on my door. I looked out at the driveway and saw nothing but empty asphalt.
I opened the tracking app and watched seventeen little dots moving in a neat convoy. An evacuation without me. Then my mother’s tablet lit up with a notification from a new group chat.
Slay team, no Jade. My name is Jade Warren, and at thirty-four years old, I had long ago accepted that silence was a luxury I could rarely afford. But this silence was different.
It was heavy, textured, and suffocating. It was 6:18 in the morning on December 23rd, a day that had been highlighted in red on my Google calendar for four months. Normally, the house would be vibrating by now.
My mother, Diane, was a loud riser. My father, Robert, usually had the television on at volume forty. My younger sister, Marin, would be running up and down the hallway shouting about a missing charger.
Today, however, the house was a tomb. I walked into the hallway. “Mom?” I called out.
“Nolan?” My voice sounded flat, absorbed instantly by the walls. No answer. I moved toward the kitchen—the heart of this sprawling suburban home that I had bought three years ago.
I paid the mortgage. I paid the insurance. I paid for repairs.
Yet I had felt like a guest in my own property. The kitchen confirmed my suspicion. The smell of coffee was stale.
The pot on the counter was empty, a dark burnt ring at the bottom. A plate sat on the island with a half-eaten Belgian waffle, syrup congealing around the edges. Three used mugs, stained with lipstick and coffee rings, clustered together.
The sink was piled high with cereal bowls and spoons. They had eaten breakfast without me. I looked at the clock.
6:22. We were scheduled to leave at seven. The plan—my plan, the spreadsheet I had circulated three times—was to leave at seven to beat holiday traffic.
I walked to the living room window and pulled back the curtain. My driveway was empty. My father’s SUV was gone.
Marin’s convertible was gone. The rental van I had paid for was gone. And Nolan’s car—my fiancé’s sleek black sedan—was missing.
Gone. All of them. I unlocked my phone and opened the Find My app.
There they were: seventeen little contact photos, clustered together in a tight formation, moving west on the interstate. They were already sixty miles away. I watched the dots move for a full minute.
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