The closing room was so quiet I could hear the pen scratching across paper, and no one with my last name walked in. I told myself they were just late. Stuck in traffic.
Busy. Anything but what it really was. Three days later, my mother sent seven words that turned my blood cold.
And one week after that, the police showed up at my door to question my sanity. It begs the question: if my family couldn’t be bothered to show up for the celebration, why did they suddenly decide to appear using the law? My name is Audrey Foster, and I had spent thirty-four years waiting for a moment that was supposed to feel like a crescendo.
Instead, it felt eerily like an expiration date. I stood in the lobby of Blue Harbor Title Services in downtown Brook Haven, Carolina, watching dust motes dance in a shaft of afternoon sunlight cutting across the reception desk. It was a Tuesday.
The air conditioner hummed a low mechanical drone that seemed to vibrate in my teeth. I checked my watch. It was two minutes to four in the afternoon.
The closing agent—Sarah, a woman with reading glasses perched on the end of her nose—poked her head out of the conference room. She smiled, but it was that tight, professional smile people wear when they’re ready to go home to their own families. “Ms.
Foster, we’re ready for you,” she said. I nodded and smoothed the fabric of my blazer. Then I turned toward the glass double doors one last time.
Through the tinted glass, the parking lot shimmered in the late-day light. A silver sedan that looked like my father’s eased past the entrance, but it didn’t slow down. It just kept going.
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