Chapter 1 — Six Days of Silence

“Sir, your son has been sleeping in my house for six days, and I can’t keep hiding him anymore.”

That was the first sentence I heard after nearly a week out of contact, crop-dusting cornfields between the border towns of Fairview and Pinecrest.

My name is Lucas Drake.

I am forty-one, and I work as an agricultural pilot.

When you fly a few feet above the ground with power lines and treetops and fence posts flashing past your windshield, a phone is worse than useless; it is a distraction that can kill you.

So on long jobs, we lock our phones in the hangar and check them only when the day’s flying is done.

That particular job ran six full days.

About one hundred and forty-eight hours of total silence.

When I turned my phone back on, the screen showed eighty-seven missed calls, most of them from my elderly neighbor, Mrs.

Beatrice Gable.

My first thought was that my house had burned down while I was gone.

I was wrong.

What had actually happened was stranger, and worse, and — though it would take me months of grief and terror to understand it — better, in the end, than anything I could have dreamed.

Because a woman I had buried seven years earlier had not, it turned out, ever been in the ground at all.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Let me tell it the way it happened to me, in the order the truth arrived, because the order is part of the horror, and part of the miracle too.

Chapter 2 — Your Son