I was on my way to church when I realized I’d forgotten my hearing aid and turned back. That’s when I heard my daughter-in-law arguing loudly with my son. “Tonight, this ends,” she said. I moved closer to listen—and what I heard next made me leave immediately, shaken.

That Sunday morning in mid-November, the air was crisp, smelling of fallen leaves and woodsmoke. I was running characteristically late for the 9:00 AM service at St. Anne’s. My son Paul and his wife, Natalie, had stayed the night after Saturday dinner. Their visits had become more frequent in recent months, a change I had initially welcomed with a mother’s naive gratitude, though a nagging instinct in my gut—one I kept silencing—wondered why they suddenly found farm life so appealing.

They occupied the guest room now, the same room where Paul had slept as a boy, surrounded by posters of astronauts and baseball stars, before he’d moved to Richmond. He returned five years ago with a law degree, expensive suits, and a wife whose smile was as polished and cold as a marble countertop.

I was halfway down the gravel driveway, my sensible church shoes crunching rhythmically against the stones, when I felt that hollow sensation in my ear. It was a physical absence, a silence on my right side where the world should have been. My hearing aid. I’d left it on the bathroom counter, right beside the porcelain soap dish my late husband, Thomas, had brought back from a business trip to Charleston thirty years ago.

I sighed, turning back toward the house. The farmhouse loomed white and stoic against the blue sky. It seemed different as I stepped back inside—quieter, heavier, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. I moved softly through the foyer, instinctively avoiding the creaking floorboard near the coat closet—old habits from raising three children who’d tested every boundary of curfew and silence.

That’s when I heard it. Natalie’s voice.

It wasn’t her usual public voice—the high-pitched, syrupy tone she used at church potlucks. This was her real voice: sharp, urgent, and cutting through the morning stillness like a serrated blade.

“Tonight, Paul. We finish this tonight.”

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