My name is Skyla Morales, and right now I am invisible.
Not metaphorically. Not in the sentimental sense people use when they want to sound wounded at parties. I mean physically, strategically, beautifully invisible. I am sitting in the driver’s seat of a rented silver sedan with tinted windows, parked far enough down the lane to be mistaken for a contractor, a lost tourist, or a neighbor’s guest, but close enough to see every smug, entitled detail of what is happening in my driveway.
My driveway.
Even thinking those words sends a cool pulse through me, a private current of satisfaction so precise it feels engineered.
The engine is off. The air conditioning died five minutes ago because I shut the car down to avoid attracting attention, and the Georgia heat is doing what Georgia heat does in late afternoon—settling over everything with wet, relentless authority. It presses against the glass in heavy waves. Sweat gathers behind my knees and between my shoulder blades. The steering wheel is warm beneath my palms. The inside of the sedan smells faintly like vinyl, sunscreen, and the fast-food coffee I bought an hour ago and never drank.
It is ninety degrees in Seabrook Cove today, with the kind of humidity that makes the air feel less like something you breathe and more like something that clings.
I don’t mind the heat.
The heat keeps me alert. It keeps my jaw set and my mind sharp. It reminds me that I am very much here, very much real, even if the people currently hauling coolers and designer tote bags into my beach house spent the last month behaving as if I had been erased from the family registry.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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