Melissa sat on the edge of Phei's old bed in the dim, dust-moted bedroom that still smelled faintly of him — cold pine, black frost, and something ancient no one could name.
The walls were bare now, stripped of the few things he'd once kept here — a second-hand paperback with the spine cracked, a charger cable coiled in the corner, the indent in the mattress where a boy too thin for his height had slept for ten years.
Gone. All of it.
But the silence felt heavier than when he'd lived in it, as if the room had been holding its breath since he left and hadn't figured out how to exhale.
Downstairs the house was alive with violence.
Harold's voice boomed through the floors — slams of fists on tables, shattering glass, guttural shouts that rattled the old chandeliers and made the crystal drops chatter against each other in tiny, terrified percussion.
