Chapter One

"Sometimes what you don't hear is worse than what you do."

Monday

I woke up feeling normal.

That was the first weird thing—how normal it felt.

No nightmare. No warning. No creepy sense pressing down on my chest telling me to brace for something. Just sunlight shoving its way through the blinds in those thin yellow strips, landing in warm bars across my comforter, and that lazy, half-awake stretch where your whole body kind of sighs and your brain is still halfway in a dream you’re already forgetting. One of those mornings where you feel almost smug about having more time before the alarm.

Then I remembered.

Mom and Dad were still gone.

Two days going on three, and I hadn’t heard a word from either of them—or from Grandma, who they’d driven up to see. Not a single text. Not one of Mom’s check-in calls, the kind where she’d ask if I was okay and then immediately start listing things I’d probably forgotten to do, like take out the recycling or eat something with actual nutrients in it.

Nothing.

I reached over and grabbed my phone off the nightstand before I was even fully sitting up. It was automatic at this point. Roll over, grab phone, check for messages. The kind of muscle memory you don’t even notice until it stops working the way it’s supposed to.

No service.

Not one bar. Not the little SOS indicator that sometimes showed up when you were in a dead zone and your phone was basically begging for help. Not even the ghost of a signal—just that empty, hollow icon in the corner where the bars were supposed to be, like someone had just quietly erased the whole network overnight.

I stared at it like I could fix it through willpower.

Tapped the screen. Checked the settings. Toggled airplane mode on, counted to five the way some article had once told me helped reset the connection, toggled it back off. Nothing. Held the power button until the restart screen appeared, watched the little animation cycle through, watched the phone boot back up with that optimistic little chime.

Still nothing.

I sat up and ran my thumb across the screen one more time, just to be sure.

The signal icon stayed empty.

My stomach did a slow, low tightening—not full panic. More like the feeling right before a test you sort of studied for but not really, where you know you’re not doomed but you’re definitely not comfortable either. That place between fine and not fine where your body starts paying closer attention to things.

I set the phone face-down on the nightstand and just sat there for a second.

Listened.

That’s when I noticed it.

The silence.

It wasn’t just quiet. Apartments were never really quiet, even when they felt like it. There was always some layer of background noise you stopped hearing because it was always there—pipes ticking behind the walls, the low mechanical hum of appliances, the elevator cable shifting, someone’s bass bleeding through the ceiling. The building had its own kind of heartbeat. Steady. Unremarkable. You only noticed it when it was gone.

And now it was gone.

I sat still on the edge of my bed and really listened, the way you only do when something feels off. No pipes. No elevator. No footsteps in the hallway. No muffled TV from next door, no dog that barked at the mail every single day like it hadn’t figured out that the mail always came. Not even Mrs. Keller two floors down, who ran her vacuum on what seemed like a personal vendetta schedule against dirt.

Nothing.

Just my own breathing, and the faint movement of air from the vent, and silence that had a weight to it. The kind of silence that made your ears strain and reach and come up empty.

I pushed myself up and padded into the hallway in my socks, past the framed photos Mom kept on the wall that I walked by every day without seeing. The apartment felt colder than it should have. Not freezing, just off—like it had been sitting unoccupied for longer than one night. Which was ridiculous. I’d been here the whole time. I knew I’d been here.

But it still felt that way.

I went to the living room window first. Peeled back the edge of the curtain and looked down at the street.

My first instinct was to think I’d gotten the time wrong. Like maybe it was four in the morning somehow and I’d confused myself. That was the only explanation that made immediate sense, because the street below looked the way it only ever looked at that strange dead hour when even the city was asleep.

Empty.

Not just slow—empty.

No one walking to the bus stop. No one with a coffee cup and a laptop bag. No early jogger, no kid dragging their feet toward school, no delivery truck double-parked with the hazards on while someone wrestled a dolly down the steps. Even the pigeons that usually stood on the power line across the street were gone.

The parked cars sat at the curbs exactly where they always were, but they looked wrong somehow. Abandoned, like whoever had left them didn’t plan to come back. A plastic bag skated across the empty sidewalk in the wind, flipping end over end. A newspaper had come apart and spread itself across the crosswalk, pages pinned flat by their own weight.

But no people.

It was so different from last night that it was almost hard to connect the two. Last night this street had been a mess—headlights packed bumper to bumper in both directions, horns going off in that flat, constant way that stopped meaning anything after the first ten minutes. I’d watched from this same window while the news played in the background, something about shelter orders and the flu variant spreading faster than projected. A woman on the sidewalk below had been dragging a rolling suitcase so fast one of the wheels snapped off, and she’d kept going anyway, hauling it on three wheels like she didn’t have time to care. Someone had been yelling—I couldn’t make out the words, just the tone, that particular pitch people hit when they’re scared and trying to sound like they’re not. By midnight the street had finally gone quiet, and I’d told myself that meant people had calmed down, that they’d gotten where they were going or given up and gone back inside.

Now, looking at the empty cars and the stillness, I wasn’t sure which one it was.

I let the curtain fall and stepped back.

Okay, I thought. Breathe. Don’t be that person. Don’t stand here catastrophizing before breakfast.

There were normal explanations.

There had been news about the flu variant for weeks—Mom had kept it on in the background the way she did with things she was keeping an eye on. Something about hospitals in other cities. Talk about containment. Someone in the building had mentioned the word lockdown in the elevator last week, and I hadn’t really paid attention because it always felt like something happening somewhere else, to other people, in the abstract.

But lockdowns happened. Quarantines happened. Maybe the panic from last night had burned itself out and everyone was finally doing what they’d been told. Maybe this was what it looked like when people actually stayed inside for once—when the emergency broadcasts worked and the whole city just… stopped. Maybe the quiet meant it was over, or at least that the worst of it had passed.