Sarah kicked the door until her foot went numb. It wouldn’t budge. She ran around back, smashed the kitchen window with a patio chair, and crawled over the sink, glass slicing her palms. Inside smelled wrong—like wet pennies and birthday candles. Every clock in the house was frozen at 3:33 a.m. She found Mike in the dining room exactly as the photo showed: standing in the middle, arms around nothing, grinning like he’d won the lottery. The four pale children were gone. But their backward footprints circled him, fresh and dripping. “Mike?” she whispered. He turned. His eyes were milk-white. “We needed a fifth grown-up,” he said in a voice that wasn’t his—layered, like four kids speaking through one throat. “You’re late to the party, Mommy.”
