CHAPTER FIFTEEN #3
“Thank you, Mr. Torres. And where are you right now? What’s the address?”
He rattled it off automatically; he’d used it on too many ride-share apps for it not to be burned into his brain.
“Fourteen Winthrop Lane, Cambridge. It’s a townhouse. I’m upstairs in the office.”
“All right. Units are being dispatched as we speak.” He heard the clatter of a keyboard in the background. “Is anyone else in the house with you?”
“I don’t—” He looked wildly around the room, suddenly acutely aware of the open doorway behind him, the hallway beyond. The house had that peculiar stillness again: the kind that could mean empty, or could mean someone holding their breath just out of sight.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I didn’t see anyone. The door was locked but the chain was on, which is… that’s not normal. I used the spare key. I called out. No one answered. I haven’t checked everywhere.”
“Okay. For your safety, I’d like you to leave the house and wait for the officers outside, all right? Don’t touch anything else.”
He nodded, then realized she couldn’t see him. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Can you walk and stay on the line with me?”
He looked at Sarah one more time, committing the image to memory even though he knew it would never leave him now, no matter what he did.
“I can walk,” he said, though his legs weren’t completely convinced.
He backed toward the door.
The urge to apologize to her as he left — for leaving, for not being able to fix this, for not arriving ten minutes earlier — rose so sharply he almost swallowed it whole.
“Mr. Torres?” the dispatcher prompted gently.
“Yeah. Still here.”
He stepped into the hallway.
The carpet runner muffled his footsteps, making him feel like he was sneaking. Every doorway he passed felt like a mouth that might suddenly open, disgorging whatever monster had created the scene behind him.
He moved faster.
At the top of the stairs, he glanced back once.
From this angle he couldn’t see Sarah’s face, only the line of her back, the fall of hair, the square of the crow painting on the desk.
The bird’s painted eye seemed to catch the light in a way that made it look almost wet.
He tore his gaze away and went down.
“Officers are about three minutes out,” the dispatcher said in his ear. “EMS as well. You’re doing great. Are you experiencing any chest pain? Trouble breathing?”
He almost laughed.
“Yes,” he said. “But I think that’s just… being a human in this situation.”
“Understood,” she said, with the faintest hint of sympathy. “If anything changes, you let me know.”
He reached the bottom of the stairs, crossed the hallway in a daze, and stepped out onto the porch.
The sunlight hit him like a slap.
The normal world — the one with cheerful mail trucks and joggers and neighbours watering potted plants — was still there, indifferent to whatever had just shattered upstairs.
He leaned one hand on the porch railing, the wood solid under his palm, and bent forward, pulling in a breath that felt like the first real one since he’d opened her door.
“Mr. Torres?” the dispatcher asked. “You’re outside now?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I’m going to stay with you until responders arrive. If you see anyone approaching the house who doesn’t look like law enforcement, please step back inside and lock the door. Can you do that?”
He looked up and down the street.
A woman in yoga pants trotted past with a stroller, earbuds in, humming along to something only she could hear. A man in a suit hustled toward the T station, glancing at his watch. Across the way, the lady from number eight fought a losing battle with a recycling bin and the breeze.
Everything looked aggressively normal.
“Yeah,” he said. “I can do that.”
“Is there anyone we should call for you?” the dispatcher asked. “Family member, friend?”
His first instinct was to say Sarah.
The word jammed in his throat.
He thought of his sister in Houston, eight months pregnant and already convinced the world was out to get her baby. He couldn’t dump this on her right now. He thought of their lead engineer, Rashid, who would spiral into depressive statistics about founder mortality rates.
Then he thought of the investors, the board, the endless LinkedIn messages congratulating them on their last funding round. The press who’d had Sarah on their Top Thirty Tech Visionaries list only two months ago.
How the hell was he supposed to tell any of them?
“Not yet,” he said softly. “Let me… I need to talk to the officers first.”
“Of course.”
The wail of sirens drifted up faintly from somewhere beyond the next block, rising and falling as the vehicles navigated traffic.
Torres stared at the street without really seeing it, the sound of the sirens threading into the rushing in his ears.
Behind him, through the open doorway, the house exhaled its smell of coffee and citrus and something darker.
He realized his hands were still shaking around the phone.
He forced his fingers to loosen, just a little, and reached with his free hand for the small brass key in his pocket, clenching it tight like a talisman.