Laura’s mother, Evelyn Carter, lived about forty-five minutes away on a small rural property outside Aurora. Sophie had never spent the night there alone. Not once.
Evelyn believed in “discipline” in a way that had always made me uneasy. She wasn’t loud. She wasn’t violent in any obvious way. She was colder than that. Rigid. Precise. The kind of woman who believed children should stay silent unless spoken to. Sophie, on the other hand, laughed too loudly and asked too many questions. They did not mix well.
Laura kept wiping the same spot on the counter.
“She wanted to spend time with Sophie,” she said. “Grandmother-granddaughter bonding.”
Still, something didn’t sit right.
“Since when?”
“Since… yesterday.”
Her phone buzzed on the table. Laura grabbed it too quickly and turned the screen away from me before reading the message. I saw a flicker of anxiety pass across her face before she locked the phone.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah. Just work stuff.”
The knot in my stomach grew heavier.
I showered and changed clothes, trying to shake off the strange tension that seemed to have settled over the house. But the silence kept bothering me. Normally, Sophie would have been talking nonstop by then, showing me drawings, begging for piggyback rides, filling the whole place with life. Instead, the house felt like a hotel room. Temporary. Unlived in.
Laura barely spoke during dinner. Her phone buzzed three more times. Every time, she angled the screen away.
Finally, I set down my fork.
“I’m going to see Sophie.”
Laura’s head snapped up.
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“It’s already late.”
“Exactly.”
If Sophie was really staying overnight somewhere, she should already have been asleep. But something in Laura’s voice felt panicked.
“She’s fine,” Laura insisted. “You can see her tomorrow.”
I stared at her.
“Why does that sound like you don’t want me to?”
Her eyes flickered.
“I just think you’re tired from travel.”
“I’ve been more tired in Afghanistan.”
Silence stretched between us.
Then I stood up.
“I’ll be back in a couple hours.”
This time she didn’t argue. But the look on her face followed me all the way to the car.
The road to Evelyn’s place wound through a quiet stretch of rural land east of Aurora. Snow drifted across the highway. The dashboard thermometer read four degrees Celsius, barely above freezing. My headlights cut through the darkness as unease twisted deeper in my gut.