Part 2

If you’ve never sat through an ICU night, let me tell you what it does to time. Minutes stretch. Hours fold in on themselves. Everything smells like sanitizer and plastic, and every sound—every beep, every shoe squeak in the hallway—feels like it might be the moment your whole life changes again.

Miles showed up around midnight with his hair still damp from a rushed shower, wearing the same gray hoodie he wore for grocery runs and bad news. He didn’t ask questions at first. He just wrapped his arms around me so tight I could finally exhale.

“I’m here,” he murmured into my hair. “I’ve got you.”

I wanted to melt into that sentence, to let it hold me up. But my eyes kept sliding toward the ICU doors like I could will them open.

When the nurse finally let us in for a brief visit, my parents looked smaller. Machines surrounded them, their wires like thin vines. My mom’s skin had that waxy hospital paleness, and my dad’s hand—my dad’s big, capable hand—lay limp on the sheet.

I leaned down and whispered, “Hey. It’s me. You’re not allowed to do this, okay?”

No response, just the steady rise and fall of assisted breathing.

Back in the hallway, I checked my phone. Kara had sent two more texts:

You okay?
Let me know if you need anything.

The words looked polite. Too polite. Like something pasted from a grief manual.

I called her anyway. It rang twice and went to voicemail.

I tried again. Same thing.

Miles watched my face. “She’s not picking up?”

“She asked me to check the mail,” I said, and the sentence tasted sour. “She knew they were alone.”

“Does she have a key?”

“Yeah. We both do.”

A nurse walked by pushing a cart. The wheels made a soft rattling sound, like coins in a jar. That sound dug into my nerves.

Around 2 a.m., a detective came to talk to me. He was polite, careful, the kind of man who probably never raised his voice because he didn’t need to.

“Any recent repairs?” he asked. “Any issues with the furnace?”

“My dad would’ve told me,” I said, then realized how little that meant when I’d been avoiding visits. Guilt flared hot and sharp.

“Who last had access to the house?”

“My sister,” I admitted. “Kara. But she said she’s out of town.”

The detective’s pen paused. “Where out of town?”

“She didn’t say. She just said ‘a few days.’”

He wrote it down anyway, and the scratch of pen on paper made me irrationally angry. Like he was turning my family into a case file.

At sunrise, Kara finally appeared in the hospital hallway wearing sunglasses indoors.

That was the first thing that made my stomach clench. Kara loved drama, but she loved looking composed even more. Sunglasses in a hospital at 7 a.m. felt like armor.

She pulled them off when she saw me, her eyes wide, glossy. Her perfume hit me next—something sweet and expensive, like vanilla and citrus. It felt obscene in that sterile hallway.

“Oh my God,” she breathed, rushing toward me. “Jamie. I just—Miles called me and I—how bad is it?”

“They’re in the ICU,” I said. My voice came out flat.

Her mouth fell open. She pressed her hand to her chest like she’d been punched. For a second I almost believed her.

Then she asked, too quickly, “Did the doctors say what caused it?”

“Carbon monoxide,” I said, watching her face.

Kara blinked. “Carbon monoxide? But… the alarms—”

“One was missing batteries,” I cut in. “Another was unplugged.”

Her eyes flicked away. Just for a moment. Toward the vending machines. Toward anything that wasn’t me.

“That’s… weird,” she said softly.

Weird. Like a mysterious stain. Like a wrong number call. Not like attempted death.

Miles stepped closer, his presence quiet but solid. “Where were you, Kara?”

She looked at him, then back at me. “A retreat,” she said. “Upstate. No service. It was supposed to be a reset.”

“A reset,” I echoed, because my brain got stuck on how normal she was trying to make it sound.

Kara nodded eagerly. “I texted you, remember? I told you we’d be out for a few days.”

“You told me to grab the mail,” I said. “And you mentioned the basement door.”

She waved a hand like that detail didn’t matter. “Yeah, it sticks. Dad always complains about it.”

The nurse opened the ICU doors briefly, and I caught a glimpse of my mom’s bed. Kara didn’t look. Not once. She kept her eyes on me, reading my face like it was a script she needed to follow.

Later that morning, Miles leaned in close. “I want to go back to the house.”

“What?” I whispered.

“We need to see what’s going on there,” he said. “CO doesn’t just spike like that without a reason. And the detectors… that’s not random.”

I should’ve said no. I should’ve said the house felt cursed now, like stepping inside again would break something in me permanently.

Instead, I nodded.

We drove back mid-afternoon. The neighborhood looked normal again—kids riding bikes, sprinklers ticking, someone mowing a lawn. It made my skin crawl. Like the world didn’t know it was supposed to be grieving.

Inside, the air still felt heavy. Even with the windows cracked, it held that stale, suffocating memory.

Miles moved like he’d been here a hundred times, straight to the hallway where the detector should’ve been. He stared at the spot on the wall. Two screw holes. A clean rectangle where dust hadn’t settled.

“It’s gone,” he said quietly.

My throat tightened. “Maybe the paramedics took it?”

He shook his head. “They said they brought in what they found. If it’s gone, it was removed.”

We checked the kitchen. The second detector was there—technically. It sat on the counter, unplugged, its cord curled like a dead snake.

Miles picked it up, flipped it over. “Battery compartment’s empty too.”

I felt heat rise behind my eyes. “Why would anyone—”

The back door creaked in the wind and I jumped so hard my heart stung.

Miles reached into the trash can under the sink, the one my mom lined with those thin, crinkly bags that always tore. He pulled out papers, wrappers, the grocery flyer.

Then he froze.

He held up a receipt, pinched between two fingers like it could contaminate him.

I leaned closer. The paper smelled faintly of onions and soap.

“Hardware store,” Miles said, reading. “Flue vent kit. Duct sealant. Two packs of AA batteries.”

My stomach turned cold.

Because someone hadn’t forgotten the batteries. Someone had bought them.

And standing there in my parents’ kitchen, staring at that receipt, I felt the first real shape of fear—sharp, personal, and familiar enough to have a name.

If the batteries were purchased… where the hell did they go?

Part 3

By day three, exhaustion made everything feel unreal. Like I was watching my life through thick glass.

My parents remained unconscious, drifting in and out of whatever fog carbon monoxide leaves behind. The nurses spoke in careful tones. The doctor kept saying words like “neurological assessment” and “oxygen deprivation,” and I kept thinking about my mom’s hand on the carpet, reaching for something she never got to.

Kara hovered in the waiting room like a person playing the role of Concerned Daughter. She brought coffee, but it was always the wrong kind—extra sweet, flavored, like she didn’t remember that our dad drank his black and our mom liked hers with just a splash of milk.

She also kept asking the same question in different outfits: “Do they know what happened yet?”

The detective came back with more questions. This time he asked about finances. About wills. About who lived closest.

Kara’s voice got oddly bright. “Mom and Dad are fine financially,” she said, like she was proud of that. “They own the house outright.”

I stared at her. My skin prickled.

That night, Miles sat beside me, scrolling through something on his phone. His jaw was tight the way it got when he was trying not to scare me.

“I pulled the thermostat history,” he said quietly.

I blinked, slow. “You can do that?”

He nodded. “If it’s a smart system, it logs changes. Temperature shifts. Manual overrides.”

“And?” My voice came out too loud, desperate.

He hesitated. “Some of the logs are missing.”

“Missing,” I echoed.

“Deleted,” he corrected, and the word made my stomach drop.

Thermostats don’t delete themselves.

We drove back to the house again, because apparently my new hobby was walking into my childhood home and feeling my soul shrivel.

Miles went straight to the utility closet where the furnace lived. The closet smelled like dust and metal, like old pennies. He crouched, inspecting the vent pipe.

“It’s not seated right,” he muttered.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means exhaust can leak back into the house,” he said. “But here’s the thing… this doesn’t look like it slipped. It looks like someone loosened it.”

My mouth went dry. “Someone?”

Miles glanced at me. “Jamie, the screws are fresh. See the scratches? Like a screwdriver slipped.”

I wrapped my arms around myself. My hoodie suddenly felt too thin.

We checked the garage. The air was colder there, damp with concrete. My dad’s tools hung neatly on the pegboard, labels still visible. He loved order. Seeing it untouched made me angrier somehow.

Then Miles opened the junk drawer in the kitchen, the one every family has, full of rubber bands and expired coupons and batteries that may or may not be dead.

There, under a pile of random keys, was the missing hallway detector.

Just sitting there.

No batteries.

I stared at it so hard my eyes burned.

“I knew it,” Miles said, voice low. “They removed it.”

“Who is ‘they’?” I whispered, though I already knew the answer my brain was trying not to say.

Miles didn’t respond. He didn’t need to.

Back at the hospital, I went through the bag of my mom’s belongings they’d brought in—her purse, her wallet, her small notebook where she wrote grocery lists in looping cursive. The notebook smelled like her hand lotion, that soft floral scent that always made me think of clean towels.

A folded sticky note fell out.

It was ripped in half, like someone had torn it quickly.

On it, in my mom’s handwriting, were two words:

Don’t trust—

That was it.

My throat closed. My ears rang. Don’t trust who?

I showed Miles. His face tightened. “Did she write this recently?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “But she wouldn’t write something like that for no reason.”

We asked the nurse if we could speak to the detective again.

While we waited, Miles tried something else: he logged into my parents’ doorbell camera account. They’d installed it last year after some packages went missing. My dad liked having “proof,” even if he mostly used it to complain about delivery drivers stepping on his flower bed.

The app loaded slowly, spinning and spinning like it enjoyed torturing me.

Most of the footage from the week before was there—nothing dramatic. A mail carrier. A neighbor’s cat. A delivery guy dropping off a box.

Then… gaps.

Long ones.

“Someone erased clips,” Miles said, voice flat.

I swallowed hard. “Can you restore them?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “If they were deleted recently.”

He tapped through settings, his fingers quick, steady. Watching him work was the only thing keeping me from floating away.

Then the screen flashed.

A restored clip appeared—short, grainy, timestamped two nights before I found my parents.

The video showed the side of the house near the garage.

A figure in a hoodie moved through the frame, head down. They paused at the garage keypad. Their hands moved fast, confident.

The garage door lifted.

The figure stepped inside.

And for half a second, as they turned their head, the porch light caught their profile.

Not enough to see a face clearly.

But enough to recognize the way they walked—like they were always in a hurry, like the world owed them room.

My chest went tight, my vision narrowing.

Because I knew that walk. I’d followed it my whole childhood.

And the worst part was this: if I was right, then my mom’s note wasn’t paranoia. It was a warning she didn’t have time to finish.

So why would someone who had a key… still sneak in like a stranger?
Part 4-5-6 FINAL