Chapter 32

Kelsey POV

The drive back from town should have felt peaceful.

Only two days had passed since our afternoon in the park—a quiet, domestic interlude that had felt almost too perfect to be real. For a few hours, watching Garrison lift Liam onto his shoulders and hearing my son's bright laughter echo through the trees, the weight of our past had seemed to lift. I had allowed myself to feel a blossom of hope.

But the last twenty-four hours at the cabin had been thick with an unspoken, suffocating tension. Laura had been acting strangely. She was pale, jumpy, her eyes rimmed with red as if she’d been crying, jumping every time the phone buzzed or a floorboard creaked. When I asked her what was wrong, she brushed it off as a migraine.

Reluctantly, I had left the house to drop off our newly optimized Blackwood Ridge budget sheets at the local production office in town and pick up some groceries. I had only been gone for two hours.

But the m