Chapter 3: The Fall
The body beneath the tree was not a body.
Halfway across the frozen grass, Liam’s mind caught up with what his eyes were actually seeing. The white shape was Nora’s coat, crumpled and half-open, one sleeve twisted underneath as if it had been dropped or torn free. Beside it, a pale scarf lay damp with frost. There was no blood. No broken form. No Nora.
He stopped so abruptly he nearly fell.
“Nora?”
His voice sounded wrong in the open air—too loud, too frightened. He turned in a circle, scanning the side of the building, the parking strip, the dark line of hedges separating their complex from the next. November wind moved through the branches above him and made the empty coat shift just enough to look alive for a fraction of a second.
She was not there.
Liam grabbed the coat from the ground. It was cold and wet, heavier than it should have been. One of the buttons was missing. Near the hem, a dark smear of something that might have been mud or might have been worse streaked the fabric. He held it like a man holding the last solid object in a world that had started dissolving.
He looked up at their balcony.
From below, the open sliding door made the apartment look exposed, as if the life inside it had been broken open and left unattended. The railing where the handprint had been gleamed faintly under the security light.
Someone had been up there after he locked her out.
Someone wet.
Someone who had left a trail through his living room and disappeared into the same night that had swallowed his wife.
Liam pulled out his phone, hands shaking so hard he nearly dropped it. He called Nora’s number.
It rang from somewhere above him.
The sound drifted down from the open balcony—her phone, still inside the apartment or just outside the rail, ringing and ringing into the cold.
She had not taken it with her.
Which meant she had not left under ordinary circumstances.
Liam stood beneath the balcony with her wet coat in his arms and felt the first true wave of terror move through him—not anger, not humiliation, not the wounded pride that had made him turn the lock hours earlier.
Terror.
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Because whatever had happened after he shut that door, it was no longer a lesson.
It was a disappearance.
