Then he looked at me so suddenly that my chest tightened.
He reached across the table and grabbed my wrist.
His little fingers dug in hard enough that I felt every knuckle.
“Hide outside the house,” he whispered.
For a second, I thought I had misheard him.
“What?” I asked.
His eyes flicked to the front of the house, then to the back door.
“Please,” he said. “Right now.”
Tyler froze with his fork halfway up.
The old wall clock ticked above the pantry.
The refrigerator hummed.
Outside, cicadas buzzed in the wet summer heat.
There are moments when adults ruin everything by insisting a frightened child give them adult reasons.
I did not do that.
Noah had been too strange for too many days.
He had stopped eating.
He had stopped laughing at Tyler’s jokes.
He had gone quiet in the pool, quiet on the couch, quiet in the hallway when he thought no one could see him standing near the front curtains.
At 11:42 p.m. on Monday night, I found him sitting halfway down the stairs in his dinosaur pajamas, staring at the front door.
On Tuesday morning, I called my sister Emily.
It went straight to voicemail.
On Wednesday, I started writing down every odd thing Noah said in the Notes app on my phone.
Not because I thought I would need proof.
Because something in my body had stopped believing this was just homesickness.
Noah’s fear had a direction.
It pointed at windows.
It pointed at doors.
It pointed at the street.
So when he whispered for us to hide, I did not ask him to explain himself again.
I grabbed Tyler’s hand, then Noah’s.
“Move slowly,” I said.
Tyler looked at me with huge eyes.
“Mom, are we in trouble?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But we’re listening to Noah.”
We went through the back door.
