“Run. Don’t trust your mother,” my dad warned in the middle of the night. We fled barefoot. And the blood under her window? It told us everything she refused to say.
“Run. Don’t trust your mother,” my dad warned in the middle of the night. We fled barefoot. And the blood under her window? It told us everything she refused to say.
The vibration of my phone dragged me out of sleep at 2:07 a.m. I squinted at the screen, annoyed, ready to silence it—until I saw the sender.
Dad.
He hadn’t texted me in months. Since the divorce, communication had been stiff, scheduled, filtered through lawyers. I opened the message.
Grab your sister and run. Don’t trust your mother.
That was it. No explanation. No punctuation. My chest tightened.
I slid out of bed and padded to the hallway of our quiet suburban house in Ohio. Everything looked normal. Too normal. The hum of the fridge downstairs. The soft glow from the nightlight by the stairs. I checked the time again. 2:08 a.m.
I knocked softly on my sister Emily’s door. “Em?” I whispered.
No answer.
I opened it. She was asleep, earbuds in, textbooks scattered across her bed. I shook her shoulder. “Emily, wake up. We need to go. Now.”
She groaned, confused. “What? It’s the middle of the night.”
I showed her the phone. Her face drained of color.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But Dad wouldn’t send this unless it mattered.”
We moved fast. Shoes, hoodies, my car keys. I avoided looking toward my mother’s bedroom. Her door was closed, light off. I told myself she was asleep.
As we reached the back door, Emily froze. “Jake,” she whispered. “Look.”
The kitchen window—one I knew was always locked—was open. The curtain stirred slightly, even though the night air was still. On the counter below it sat my mom’s phone. Face down. Cracked screen.
My heart started pounding so hard it hurt.
Then I noticed the mud. Fresh footprints leading from the window across the tile floor. Big ones. Not mine. Not Emily’s.
A sound came from upstairs. A floorboard creaked.
“Go,” I whispered.
We slipped out the back door and cut across the yard toward the old oak tree that bordered our fence. I pulled Emily toward the neighbor’s driveway when she stopped short, staring at the side of the house.
“There,” she said, voice shaking.
Below my mother’s bedroom window, something dark lay in the grass.
As my eyes adjusted, my stomach dropped.
It was a man’s jacket. My dad’s jacket.
And beneath the open window, the ground was torn up—like there had been a struggle..
