Chapter 7
The next afternoon, the high-rise corporate office building hummed with its usual relentless energy. Maya sat at her glass-paneled desk on the thirty-second floor, reviewing a complex merger contract for a major tech acquisition. Her phone buzzed quietly against the mahogany surface. She glanced down, expecting an email from her managing partner or a Slack message from her associate. Instead, it was a text from their home security system: Front door unlocked by user: Manual Key.
Maya frowned, checking the time. It was two o'clock on a Tuesday. David was across town at a federal courthouse representing a corporate client, and Mama... well, Mama didn't usually go anywhere without demanding David drive her. A cold prickle of unease washed over her. She stood up immediately, grabbing her phone and pacing toward the private conference room to call her husband.
David answered on the second ring, his voice low and hurried. “Maya? I’m walking into the judge's chambers. Is everything alright?”
“I just got an alert from our security system,” Maya said, keeping her voice strictly professional to hide her rising panic. “Someone just unlocked our front door with a manual key. Are you home?”
“No, I'm still downtown. Did you forget something?”
“No, David. I’m at the office. Your mother is the only one with a spare manual key, and she never leaves the house by herself.”
Silence hung on the line for a fraction of a second before David sighed heavily. “Let me call her right now. Hold on, don't hang up.”
Maya pressed the phone tighter against her ear, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the sprawling cityscape below. Traffic crawled like ants along the highway, indifferent to her domestic anxieties. After a tense thirty seconds, David came back on the line, sounding distinctly rattled.
“She didn't answer her cell phone,” David admitted, his professional composure slipping. “Maya, let me call our neighbor, Mrs. Henderson, to go check on the house. Or... do you want me to leave the courthouse?”
“No, don't jeopardize your case for this,” Maya said quickly, making a swift executive decision. “I’ll leave right now. I have a gap before my four o'clock deposition prep anyway. I'll drive home and see what's going on.”
May you like
“Be careful,” David urged. “Call me the second you walk through the door.”
The drive home felt agonizingly slow. Maya’s mind raced through a dozen scenarios—was Mama sick? Had there been a break-in? Or worse, had Mama invited someone over or decided to completely remodel their living room according to her traditional tastes? When Maya finally pulled her SUV into the driveway, she noticed a strange, dusty silver sedan parked haphazardly on the curb—a car she had never seen before. She grabbed her briefcase, locked her car, and walked briskly up the front steps. The front door was unlocked, pushed open by an inch. Pushing it open wide, she stepped into the entryway and froze at the unexpected sight greeting her in the living room.
