Chapter 1 — 2:07 in the Morning

The call came at 2:07 on a Tuesday morning in November, and I still remember the cold of the kitchen tile under my bare feet when I heard my best friend’s voice break before he could finish the sentence.

“Wyatt. Talia’s gone.”

I stood completely still.

Talia was thirty-one years old.

She was Warren’s wife, and she was one of those people who seemed built to outlast anything the world could throw — steady, warm, unbreakable.

A brain aneurysm gave her no chance to be any of those things.

No warning.

No goodbye.

Nothing.

Their son, Keegan, was barely four.

“I can’t do this, Wyatt,” Warren kept saying, his breath coming ragged down the line.

“I can’t raise a kid on my own.

I can’t.”

I thought it was the shock talking.

The grief.

The raw animal panic of a man whose wife had been alive that morning and was gone by night.

I did not hear, in those broken sentences, the thing he was actually telling me.