Miles reached into the trash can under the sink, the one my mom lined with those thin, crinkly bags that always tore. He pulled out papers, wrappers, the grocery flyer.
Then he froze.
He held up a receipt, pinched between two fingers like it could contaminate him.
I leaned closer. The paper smelled faintly of onions and soap.
“Hardware store,” Miles said, reading. “Flue vent kit. Duct sealant. Two packs of AA batteries.”
My stomach turned cold.
Because someone hadn’t forgotten the batteries. Someone had bought them.
And standing there in my parents’ kitchen, staring at that receipt, I felt the first real shape of fear—sharp, personal, and familiar enough to have a name.
If the batteries were purchased… where the hell did they go?
Part 3
By day three, exhaustion made everything feel unreal. Like I was watching my life through thick glass.
My parents remained unconscious, drifting in and out of whatever fog carbon monoxide leaves behind. The nurses spoke in careful tones. The doctor kept saying words like “neurological assessment” and “oxygen deprivation,” and I kept thinking about my mom’s hand on the carpet, reaching for something she never got to.
Kara hovered in the waiting room like a person playing the role of Concerned Daughter. She brought coffee, but it was always the wrong kind—extra sweet, flavored, like she didn’t remember that our dad drank his black and our mom liked hers with just a splash of milk.
She also kept asking the same question in different outfits: “Do they know what happened yet?”
The detective came back with more questions. This time he asked about finances. About wills. About who lived closest.
Kara’s voice got oddly bright. “Mom and Dad are fine financially,” she said, like she was proud of that. “They own the house outright.”
I stared at her. My skin prickled.
That night, Miles sat beside me, scrolling through something on his phone. His jaw was tight the way it got when he was trying not to scare me.
“I pulled the thermostat history,” he said quietly.
I blinked, slow. “You can do that?”
He nodded. “If it’s a smart system, it logs changes. Temperature shifts. Manual overrides.”
“And?” My voice came out too loud, desperate.
He hesitated. “Some of the logs are missing.”
“Missing,” I echoed.
“Deleted,” he corrected, and the word made my stomach drop.
Thermostats don’t delete themselves.
We drove back to the house again, because apparently my new hobby was walking into my childhood home and feeling my soul shrivel.
Miles went straight to the utility closet where the furnace lived. The closet smelled like dust and metal, like old pennies. He crouched, inspecting the vent pipe.
“It’s not seated right,” he muttered.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means exhaust can leak back into the house,” he said. “But here’s the thing… this doesn’t look like it slipped. It looks like someone loosened it.”
My mouth went dry. “Someone?”
Miles glanced at me. “Jamie, the screws are fresh. See the scratches? Like a screwdriver slipped.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. My hoodie suddenly felt too thin.
We checked the garage. The air was colder there, damp with concrete. My dad’s tools hung neatly on the pegboard, labels still visible. He loved order. Seeing it untouched made me angrier somehow.
Then Miles opened the junk drawer in the kitchen, the one every family has, full of rubber bands and expired coupons and batteries that may or may not be dead.
There, under a pile of random keys, was the missing hallway detector.
Just sitting there.
No batteries.
I stared at it so hard my eyes burned.
“I knew it,” Miles said, voice low. “They removed it.”
“Who is ‘they’?” I whispered, though I already knew the answer my brain was trying not to say.
Miles didn’t respond. He didn’t need to.
Back at the hospital, I went through the bag of my mom’s belongings they’d brought in—her purse, her wallet, her small notebook where she wrote grocery lists in looping cursive. The notebook smelled like her hand lotion, that soft floral scent that always made me think of clean towels.
A folded sticky note fell out.
It was ripped in half, like someone had torn it quickly.
On it, in my mom’s handwriting, were two words:
Don’t trust—
That was it.
My throat closed. My ears rang. Don’t trust who?
