I walked toward the gate with my suitcase, shoulders slumped, playing the role they expected. Once hidden behind the oak trees that lined the property, I shoved the bag into the bushes and pulled my hood up.
Then I slipped along the stone wall, using the shadows, circling toward the back of the house.
Matthew’s garden looked like a battlefield.
He’d once called it his sanctuary, the place where he breathed after long shifts at the trucking company. We had pruned roses together out back, father and son, hands dirty, laughing when I teased him for planting flowers like an old woman. Now those rosebushes were trampled flat. The lawn was torn up by deep tire tracks. Mud churned everywhere.
The trucks had driven all the way back here to load something heavy.
Or hide something.
I moved quietly through bushes until I reached the shed in the corner. Matthew had built it himself, a simple pine structure he’d joked would fall apart with one good kick. But the door was different now. Reinforced with iron bars. Secured with a massive padlock that looked new.
My spine went rigid.
Why lock a tool shed like a prison cell?
I pressed my ear to the wood and listened.
At first, nothing. Then, faint but unmistakable, the clink of metal chains.
A moan followed, weak and suppressed, like someone trying not to be heard.
“Ah… water…”
My heart stopped, then slammed hard enough to hurt.
I knew that voice.
“Matthew,” I breathed, lips close to the crack in the door. “Matthew, is that you?”
Silence stretched for three long seconds.
Then a soft knock answered from inside. Knock. Knock.
And then a sob, broken and childlike.
“Dad… Daddy…”
The world tilted. For a moment I felt dizzy, not from age, but from the collision of terror and relief and rage.
My son was here. Not at an airport. Not in Miami. He was steps away from his own house, chained up like an animal while the people inside drank and laughed.
Tears burned in my eyes, but they evaporated fast, replaced by something hotter.
Fury.
I found a rusty iron bar half-buried under a bush and jammed it into the rotted latch area. The wood cracked loudly, but the music thumping inside the house swallowed the sound. I worked the bar until the latch gave. The padlock still hung, but the weakened doorframe shifted enough for me to slip inside.
I pulled the door shut behind me.
The smell hit first. Urine, blood, antiseptic, and cold concrete. My stomach turned, but I forced it down.
I clicked on my phone flashlight.
Leave a Comment