UNBROKEN

The Open Door

“Don’t,” Wren said, her hand shooting out to grip Marisol’s arm before her friend could throw the car into park and climb out. “Don’t turn off the headlights. Leave the engine running.”

“Wren, your door—”

“I know.” Her voice had gone eerily calm, the same flat, functional calm that had carried her through worse nights than this one, years ago, in a house she never let herself think about by name. “We’re not going in. We’re calling the police, and we’re waiting for Cole, and we are not, under any circumstances, walking into a house with an open door at eleven o’clock at night.”

Marisol’s hands were shaking on the wheel, but she nodded, fumbling for her own phone. “I’m calling now.”

While Marisol spoke to the dispatcher in a voice pitched higher than her usual register, Wren kept her eyes fixed on the three-inch gap of darkness beyond the porch light, watching for any flicker of movement, any shift in the shadow that would tell her whether the house was still occupied or already empty. Nothing moved. The stillness was almost worse than motion would have been — the particular silence of a place that had been gone through carefully, without hurry, by someone who knew exactly what they were looking for and had all the time in the world to find it.

Headlights swung around the corner behind them, too fast, and for one heart-stopping second Wren’s whole body braced for the black sedan before she recognized the shape of Cole’s truck pulling up hard behind Marisol’s car. He was out before it had fully stopped, jogging toward them, and Wren rolled her window down enough to call out before he could get any closer to the house.

“Door’s open. We haven’t gone in. Police are on their way.”

Cole stopped, recalibrating instantly, his eyes flicking from the porch to the two of them in the car and back again with the fast, assessing look of someone who’d apparently thought through exactly this scenario on the drive over. “Smart. Stay in the car. I’m going to circle the perimeter, not go inside — just see if there’s a vehicle, anyone still on the property.”

“Cole—”

“I’m not going in,” he said again, steady, meeting her eyes through the open window like he understood exactly what she was afraid he might do and wanted her to know, plainly, that he wasn’t going to do it. “I promise you that. I’m just going to look.”

He moved along the tree line at the edge of her small yard, staying low, keeping distance between himself and the house’s windows, and Wren watched him go with her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat. Marisol’s hand found hers in the dark of the car, gripping tight, and neither of them spoke, both watching Cole’s shadow move along the property’s edge until he disappeared around the side of the house entirely.

The minute that followed felt endless. Wren counted her own heartbeats the way she used to count the seconds after a door slammed somewhere in a house she no longer let herself picture, an old defense mechanism resurrected without her permission, and she’d reached forty-one when Cole reappeared from the opposite side of the house, jogging back toward the car.

“No vehicle. No sign of anyone right now,” he said, leaning down to the window, breathing hard. “Whoever did this is already gone. But Wren — you should know what I saw through the side window before the police get here.”

Something in his face made her stomach drop even further than it already had. “What.”

“There’s a photo on your kitchen counter. Not one of yours.” He hesitated, clearly weighing how much to say before the police arrived and made the scene official, evidence-bound, no longer just information he could share freely between them. “It’s a picture of you, taken recently — today, maybe, judging by the dress. And it’s got something written across it in marker.”

“What does it say.”

Distant sirens cut through the question before he could answer, red and blue light sweeping across the quiet street, and Cole straightened, glancing toward the approaching cruiser with the wary stillness of a man recalculating how much of tonight he was prepared to explain to law enforcement without implicating people who deserved protection rather than suspicion.

“Cole.” Wren’s voice cracked on his name, all the careful calm finally splintering. “What does it say.”

He looked back at her, and for the first time all night, something in his steady composure genuinely faltered.

“It says: I know you’re not alone anymore. That’s going to be a problem for both of you.”

the police, the fallout, and the realization that Cole’s involvement has made him a target too.