The Attic
My sister called at 12:08 in the morning. I almost let it go to voicemail. Caleb was asleep beside me in our house just outside Arlington, Virginia.
Rain moved steadily against the bedroom windows, and the baby monitor on my nightstand glowed green from Noah’s empty nursery. Our son was spending the weekend with Caleb’s parents, which was the only reason I had managed to sleep at all. Noah was four, and when he was in the house the nights were lighter, shorter, full of the small sounds of a child adjusting in his sleep that I had learned to track without fully waking.
Without him, I had slept deeply for the first time in weeks. I was groggy when the screen lit up. Then I saw the name.
Mara. My sister worked for the FBI. She was three years older than me, methodical and careful, the kind of person who chose her words the way a jeweler chooses settings — nothing wasted, nothing misplaced.
She had called me late before, but only twice, and both times it had been because someone we loved had died. When I saw her name at midnight on a rainy Friday, I pushed myself upright before I was fully awake. “Mara?”
Her voice was tight and controlled in the specific way it gets when she is working — not frightened, but held in very close.
“Listen carefully,” she said. “Turn everything off. Your phone, the lights, everything.
Go to the attic, lock the door, and don’t tell Caleb.”
A cold current moved through me. “What?”
“Now, Elise.”
I looked at my husband. He lay facing the wall, breathing slow and even, one hand loose beneath the pillow the way he always slept.
I had slept beside that breathing for six years. I knew its rhythms the way I knew the sound of Noah’s through the monitor. “You’re scaring me,” I whispered.
Mara’s voice broke through its control. “Just do it.”
I was out of bed before I understood I had decided to move. I grabbed my phone charger without thinking — pure reflex, the way you grab your keys — and slipped into the hallway in bare feet.
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