Daniel POV
The house was too quiet.
That was the first thing I noticed when I opened the front door. Not the quiet of a house where someone was already asleep or a child had finally gone down after a long evening. This was a different kind of quiet entirely. The kind that had a texture to it, like a sound that should have been there had been carefully removed and the space it left behind was still warm.
I called her name anyway.
"Mia."
Nothing came back.
I went to the kitchen first because that was where she usually was at this hour. Tea on the counter, something on the stove, the small domestic rhythm of a woman who had kept everything running so smoothly that I had stopped noticing it was running at all.
The kitchen was clean.
Too clean.
The kind of clean that happened when som
