Every Friday at 6 p.m. my daughter called me without fail, and the one week my phone stayed silent I drove to her house and heard a sound from upstairs that turned our quiet Tennessee life into something I still can’t fully talk about

isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition. Your brain catching details your conscious mind hasn’t sorted yet.

Right now, every instinct I had was screaming that the circuit was faulty, that somewhere in this situation something had gone catastrophically wrong.

I checked the clock. 8:45 a.m. Two and a half hours to Allison’s house. If I left now, I’d be continue reading …