His Chubby Obsession

Chapter Twenty-Two: Race Back

I couldn't shake it, the feeling that had settled over me somewhere between Bruce's threat by the side of the house and Papa Niel's announcement at the toast — a low, persistent hum of wrongness, the particular unease of a body that has learned, the hard way, not to trust silence just because it looks like peace.

"We should go," I told Diane, pulling her aside near the gift table, Charlotte's hand tight in mine. "Now. Before the party even finishes."

"Is something wrong?"

"I don't know yet. I just need to get her home." I didn't say safe house. I'd learned, in the last week, to be careful even with words, even in a crowd of people who probably didn't know what I meant by them.

Diane didn't argue. She'd been in this world long enough, apparently, to recognize the particular tone of a woman whose instincts had kept her alive before and were asking to be trusted again.

I found a quiet corner near the garden gate and called Enzo, my hands already unsteady before I'd even said a word.

"Something's wrong," I said, the moment he picked up. "I don't know what, I just — Bruce knows about you. About the house. He told me Vincent's been watching us for two days."

Enzo's voice went instantly hard, all the warmth from the porch step gone into something sharper, more focused. "Get Charlotte and get out of there. Now. I'll meet you on the road."

"Is Sofia — "

"She left for town this morning. Should've been back an hour ago." A pause, and I could hear him moving already, the sound of an engine starting somewhere behind his voice. "I'm heading to the house now. Just get clear of that estate and call me the second you're moving."

—

The drive felt endless in a way that had nothing to do with actual distance.

Charlotte had fallen asleep in her booster seat within minutes, exhausted from the party, Mr. Hoppy clutched against her chest, blissfully unaware of the particular terror gripping her mother's chest with every mile that passed. I kept the phone on speaker, Enzo's voice a low, steady presence on the other end, both of us saying less than we were thinking, both of us listening for the sound of the other one's breath catching wrong.

"I'm almost there," he said, twenty minutes in. "Nothing on the road. No sign of Vincent's car, nothing out of place on the approach."

"That's good. That's good, right?"

"It's something." His voice had that particular careful flatness I recognized now as him working hard not to alarm me before there was anything confirmed to be alarmed about. "I'll call you the second I'm inside."

The silence after that stretched long enough that I nearly pulled over twice, my hands shaking too badly to trust the wheel, only Charlotte's sleeping presence in the mirror keeping me steady enough to finish the drive.

When the phone finally buzzed again, it wasn't a call. It was a single text, three words, and my whole body went cold reading them.

Get here now.

—

I don't remember the last ten minutes of that drive. I remember gravel spraying under the tires as I turned too fast up the long driveway, the same driveway the headlights had swept up two nights ago, the porch coming into view in the fading evening light.

The front door was standing open.

Not shut and locked the way Enzo had drilled into me to always leave it, not even ajar in the careless way a person leaves a door when they're stepping out for just a moment. Wide open, hanging slightly off its upper hinge, like something had been forced through it in a hurry that had nothing to do with anyone simply walking in.

I threw the car into park and was out the door before it had fully stopped rolling, some distant, rational part of my brain screaming at me to think about Charlotte first, to check the surroundings, to do any of the things Enzo had taught me over the last week about not walking blind into danger — and none of it mattered, none of it slowed me down at all, because Charlotte was awake now, crying in her booster seat, and I had to get to her, and I had to know what had happened inside that house.

Enzo met me halfway across the yard, his face doing something complicated and controlled that I recognized instantly as him trying not to let me see the full shape of his own fear.

"Where's Sofia," I said, before he could say anything at all.

"I don't know yet." His jaw was tight, his eyes scanning the tree line even as he spoke to me, some part of him still on alert for a threat that hadn't fully revealed itself. "I've called her twice. No answer. Her truck's not back."

"Enzo — "

"Come here." He pulled me and, gently, Charlotte, away from the open door, toward the far side of the porch, and it was only then, following the direction of his eyes, that I saw it.

Sofia's phone, or what was left of it, lying shattered on the wooden porch boards near the steps. The screen spiderwebbed with cracks, the case split clean in two, the whole thing lying in a small scatter of glass and plastic like it had been thrown, or dropped hard, or torn from someone's hand in the middle of a struggle that had left absolutely nothing else behind to explain itself.

I stared at it, Charlotte's small, frightened weight pressed against my hip, the wide-open door behind us, the silent house beyond it, and felt every fragile piece of the safety I'd let myself believe in over the last week collapse, all at once, into something that looked exactly like what I'd feared from the very beginning.

We had never actually been safe here at all.