Isaac Brackston had never heard silence this loud.
The bus engine wheezed to a stop with a stutter and a groan, coughing diesel into the air as if the machine itself didn't want to linger here. Ella Course—population maybe fifteen hundred on a good day—waited outside the cracked window like a memory half-faded with mildew.
The name Elise echoed through his head again.
Dead. Elise is dead.
He didn't remember dropping the phone. Just the sound it made—glass spiderwebbing against linoleum. After that, the details were gone. His father's voice had been a buzz. Something about walking alone. Something about the woods. But mostly, Isaac remembered the silence that had followed. Not the absence of sound, but the pressure of it. Like a scream sucked backward into the void.
He blinked out the fog on the window with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Outside, Ella Course stretched out beneath bruised skies, a town barely holding itself together. The houses leaned too far left or right, like they were whispering secrets. Paint peeled in long, tired strips. Power lines sagged overhead, tangled like veins through the gray.
It smelled like wet leaves and old gas. Exactly the same. And not at all.
The driver cleared his throat, jerking his thumb toward the door. Isaac grabbed his duffel bag. The soccer gear inside smelled like sweat and regret. Useless now. He slung it over his shoulder and stepped off the bus, into the place he'd spent eighteen years trying to forget.
No one was waiting for him.
Not that he expected otherwise.
His father had stopped pretending when Isaac left for college. His mother, even before that. And Elise—his best friend, his childhood co-conspirator—she was supposed to be the one still here.
She'd promised. We'll always have this town.
But now the town had her, buried somewhere out past the treeline where kids weren't supposed to wander. Where something found her.
A car door creaked open behind him.
His father stood beside a battered blue sedan, one arm draped over the roof like it was the only thing keeping him upright. He hadn't shaved in days. Maybe weeks.
"Isaac," he said, his voice cracked with rust. "Get in."
They didn't speak on the ride. The car rolled past shuttered shops with rusted signage, past the school where Isaac and Elise used to skip gym to lie beneath the bleachers and make up stories about sea monsters and cursed coins and haunted libraries.
Now it all looked wrong. Empty. Still. Like the town had gone into hiding.
Isaac leaned his head against the window and watched as familiar streets blurred past, worn down by weather and time. Ella Course wasn't dying. It had already died. It just hadn't realized yet.
His voice felt strange when he finally used it. "What happened?"
His father didn't answer at first. His jaw tightened. Knuckles whitened on the steering wheel.
"They found her yesterday," he said. "Out near Beckett's Road. Just... walking."
"Walking?" Isaac repeated. "Elise wouldn't—she wouldn't just—"
"No one knows why."
The car dipped into silence again. Not peace. Not grief. Just silence. Thick, like it had weight.
At home—if it could still be called that—nothing had changed. The porch steps still groaned underfoot. A plastic wind chime twisted above the door, tangled and silent. Isaac stepped inside and was immediately swallowed by the smell of old coffee, mildew, and something faintly sour. The lights were off. The curtains drawn. The entire house felt like it had been holding its breath since Elise died.
His father didn't follow him upstairs. Just stood in the doorway and muttered, "Your room's the same."
But it wasn't.
Isaac stood in the doorway, taking it in like a museum exhibit. Same faded posters, same uneven dresser, same scuff marks on the hardwood from nights he and Elise had danced like idiots with flashlights and no music.
The photo on the nightstand made his knees buckle.
It was the three of them. Him. Elise. Pills. Arms slung around each other, eyes squinting from sun and laughter. Captured in that fragile space before the world started breaking.
He sat on the edge of the bed and let the silence wash over him.
"Elise," he whispered. The name cracked in his throat. He said it again, quieter, like she might still hear it. Like maybe she hadn't really—
But the truth settled in like dust. Heavy. Inevitable.
A soft rumble of thunder stirred the sky.
Somewhere in the distance, wind moved through the trees.
And deep inside him, Isaac felt the unmistakable tug of something waking up. Not grief. Not memory.
Something older.
Something that had been waiting for him to return.