KEALSienna’s room was the first place the house went wrong every morning.The bed was made. Staff had done that, not me. The bicycle still stood against the wall where she had left it the day before the school curb. Dragon was gone. The absence of that stupid plush thing made the room look staged, like a show apartment built to resemble a childhood.I stood in the doorway and did not enter all the way.Fourteen days.I had slept in pieces. Worked in pieces. Torn through half the city in the first seventy-two hours like a man who could force reality by speed alone. Then the reports turned from near to nowhere, and the hunt had to become quieter or it would become public. Public meant courts, press, soft strangers with opinions about my marriage. Public meant losing in a way I did not permit.So I did the other thing. I reconstructed.On the desk in my study: maps, cash-trail dead ends, clinic stills of a woman with a false name and a brace, a market exit timestamp, a bus route that br
Read more