For weeks, my 15-year-old daughter Kayla suffered from constant nausea and stomach pain, hiding inside her oversized hoodie and flinching at every touch. I knew something was horribly wrong, but the doctors kept brushing it off as teenage stress. Then, while washing her laundry, I found a hidden pocket inside her jacket , my blood boiling, and that night, I walked into the faculty dinner holding a baseball bat…
to heal enough to testify. Rachel’s house was too close. Daniel knew where she lived.
Two weeks later, we vanished into the snowy, forgotten town of Brookside Ridge, renting a small, drafty cabin at the end of a dead-end road. It was an exile, a self-imposed prison to keep the monster at bay while the detectives built their snare.
