The line cracked as the sound of Ethan's voice filled the phone.
A mixture of conflicting feelings in my chest: relief, fear, confusion. It was more than I could manage to deal with. "Ethan?" I gasped, my words cracking as I clutched the phone in my hand. My whole body shook. "Where are you? What's going on?"
There was a longer pause. Far away, faint, his voice came to me again.
"I'm. I'm fine, Mom," he whispered, the voice muffled, but the relief in his tone unmistakable.
"Ethan, where are you? Something's wrong? Why did you—"
I did not want to go home. I did not." He caught himself, frozen in the shape of a half-sentence. In the background, a muffled sound, a refrigerator hum or the clinking of a coffee cup, and then a soft, soothing feminine voice, a salve to the raw fear that had
