At 4:30 in the morning, my husband came home and saw me holding our two-month-old baby while I cooked breakfast for his whole family
I turned back to the room. Mrs. Henderson was already on her feet, her hand reaching for the landline to call the police chief. David Chen was frantically typing, trying to trace the restricted call.
But before Mrs. Henderson could lift the receiver, the power in the house suddenly cut out.
The humming of the refrigerator stopped. The printer died. The laptop screens went black as the Wi-Fi signal vanished. The electronic locks on Mrs. Henderson’s front door let out a sharp, digital whine as they defaulted to their locked, unpowered states.
In the sudden, heavy silence of the darkened house, my son Leo let out a sharp, piercing cry from his car seat.
I lunged toward him, scooping him into my arms, holding his warm, fragile body against my chest just like I had at four o’clock this morning. But this time, the kitchen wasn’t filled with the smell of bacon and burnt coffee.
It was filled with the distinct, metallic scent of ozone, and from the hallway upstairs, the slow, deliberate sound of heavy footsteps breaking through the back window echoed down the stairs.
Mark hadn’t just ruined our marriage. He had brought a monster to our doorstep, and the doors were now locked from the outside.
