The next morning, the rain had finally stopped, but the world still felt gray, like the clouds hadn’t moved on, only settled inside me.
I hadn’t slept. Not really. I kept hearing my father’s voice, replaying it over and over in my head.
Daniel… the fire… tell her the fire…
By the time I reached my office, I was running on caffeine and fear. The lobby smelled faintly of polish and paper, the kind of sterile normalcy that mocked how everything in my life had shifted overnight.
Marcy, my assistant, looked up from her desk. “You’ve got mail. Physical mail. No return address.”
My pulse jumped. “Where is it?”
She handed over a brown envelope, the kind that looked too ordinary to be safe. No stamps. No markings. Just my name scrawled in a shaky hand.
I took it to my office and shut the doo
