They left her grandmother with Alzheimer’s at the door and told her “now it’s your turn”; but when Callie began to guard her grandmother’s scattered words, she discovered exactly why her own family was so afraid she might remember a hidden box.

Chapter 1: An Unwanted Package

“Here’s your grandmother, Callie. We’re tired of hauling her around, so you need to do something useful for once in your life,” Uncle Joel announced, leaning against the frame of his pickup truck.

Callie froze in the doorway of her small apartment in the quiet suburb of Fairview, her hair still damp from a quick shower, her robe pulled tight around her waist.

Standing in front of her on the cracked sidewalk was her grandmother, Geneva, perched on a flimsy folding chair like a piece of luggage someone had forgotten at the airport.

Geneva wore a faded wool sweater, a skirt covered in coffee stains, and a pair of mismatched house slippers that looked like they’d seen better decades.

Behind them, Joel didn’t even bother to shut off the engine of his rusted truck, leaving the exhaust to fill the morning air with a thick gray haze.

His wife, Dakota, held her smartphone in one hand and adjusted her oversized sunglasses with the other, looking more bored than guilty.

“What on earth did you do to her?” Callie asked, her voice cracking as a lump of pure terror and anger rose in her throat.

“Nothing happened to her,” Joel replied, drumming his fingers impatiently against the steering wheel while glaring at the pavement.

“She’s old now. She gets lost, she screams at the walls, she breaks everything she touches. So stop playing the victim,” he added coldly.