“Maya, listen to me,” I commanded, using the deep, resonant voice I used to quiet panicked courtrooms. “Do not move from your bed. I am coming right now. I am staying on the line with you.”
I grabbed my keys and my wallet. I called my neighbor, Thomas, from the car’s Bluetooth as I tore out of my driveway in Decatur. I told him the spare key was under the mat, to feed my dog, and to pray I didn’t commit a felony before dawn.
The drive to their pristine, upper-middle-class subdivision in Marietta was a seventy-minute journey that I made in forty-five. I pushed my sedan to ninety miles an hour, the dark Georgia pines blurring into a solid wall of black outside my windows. Through the car speakers, I listened to Maya’s breathing grow shallower, her whispers becoming increasingly disjointed.
“I’ll be good,” she hallucinated, crying softly into the receiver. “I’ll be good, Mama. I won’t be sick anymore. Please don’t leave me. I’ll be quiet.”
“I’m coming, sweetheart,” I kept repeating, my knuckles white on the steering wheel. “Grandpa is almost there.”
I swung into the manicured entrance of Highland Estates, my tires screeching in the suffocating summer humidity. I pulled up to their two-story brick colonial. The house was entirely dark, save for the faint glow of a porch light that illuminated the absolute stillness of a home abandoned by its guardians.
I killed the engine and grabbed the spare key Julian had given me years ago. I jammed it into the lock, throwing my weight against the heavy oak door. As I stepped into the foyer, the oppressive, stifling heat of the house hit me like a physical blow, and the silence from my phone told me Maya had stopped answering.
The air inside the house was sweltering, heavy, and dead. They had turned off the central air conditioning to save a few dollars while they vacationed in luxury. I stumbled through the dark, slapping the wall until I found the light switch.
The sudden illumination revealed a living room curated to project the illusion of a perfect family. But my eyes, trained by years of dissecting domestic facades, immediately locked onto the hallway gallery wall. There were fifteen framed photographs perfectly aligned. Thirteen were of Leo, their eleven-year-old biological son—Leo at soccer, Leo at space camp, Leo standing between Julian and Catherine in front of the Cinderella Castle.