I felt my chest tighten.

“No,” I said slowly. “He said he had work.”

Silence.

Then she said the sentence that broke something inside me.

“He’s not alone.”

After that call, I sat awake in my childhood bedroom for hours. The same bedroom with faded blue walls my father painted when I was thirteen. The same room where he used to sit on the edge of my bed during thunderstorms because I was terrified of lightning.

Everything felt haunted by him.

The smell of old wood.

The ticking hallway clock.

The sound of pipes shifting inside the walls.

I couldn’t stop replaying the image of Andrew leaving the cemetery while I stood beside my father’s grave trying not to collapse.

At exactly 3:00 a.m., my phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

One message.

“My daughter, it’s me. Dad. Come to the cemetery immediately and very quietly.”

I stared at the screen so long my eyes started watering.

Very quietly.

Nobody used that phrase except my father.

When I was twelve and he needed to tell me we might lose the hardware store.

When I was nineteen and he admitted he was scared before surgery.

When I was thirty-two and he quietly asked me if Andrew had always been controlling behind closed doors.

Come very quietly.

It was his phrase.

I should’ve called the police.

Instead, I grabbed my keys and left.

The cemetery looked different at night. Smaller somehow. Colder.

The gates were half-open, and weak streetlights threw pale yellow pools across the grass. My footsteps sounded unnaturally loud as I walked between the graves.

Then I saw it.

My father’s phone.

Propped against his gravestone with the screen glowing.

I froze.

The dirt around the grave had footprints pressed deep into it. Fresh ones.

Someone had been there recently.

Someone had touched my dead father’s things.

“Melissa.”

I spun around so fast I nearly slipped.

An older man stepped from the shadows near the trees with both hands raised carefully. I recognized him immediately—the cemetery caretaker from earlier that day.

Walter Boone.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “Your father asked me to do this.”

I honestly thought grief had finally destroyed my mind.