The Envelope in My Mailbox
The sirens woke me at 6:12 in the morning.
I know the exact time because the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the red numbers on the clock beside my bed. The second thing I saw was blue light. Red and blue, flashing across my bedroom ceiling, over and over, bouncing off the walls.
For a second, I didn’t understand where I was.
Then the baby kicked, hard, right under my ribs, and I remembered everything. I was thirty-four weeks pregnant. I was alone. And the sirens weren’t going past my house.
They had stopped outside it.
I rolled out of bed the way you have to when you’re that pregnant. Onto my side first, then pushing up with both arms, then sitting on the edge of the mattress for a second while the room tilted. My back was screaming. My ankles were still swollen from the day before, puffy and tight, like somebody had stuffed them with wet sand.
Somebody pounded on my front door.
Not a knock. A pound. Three times, hard enough to rattle the little glass window beside it.
My heart dropped straight into my stomach.
I pulled on my robe. It didn’t close anymore over my belly, so I just held it shut with one hand. I walked down the hallway in my bare feet, past the room that was supposed to be a nursery and was still full of unopened boxes, past the stack of mail on the hall table that I hadn’t been brave enough to open.
The pounding came again.
“Coming,” I said. My voice cracked. “I’m coming.”
I opened the door.
A sheriff was standing on my porch. A real one. Tan uniform, gold star on his chest, a wide-brimmed hat in his hand. He was maybe sixty, tall and thin, with a gray mustache and a face that looked like it had been left out in the sun for a few decades.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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