"Show me."
Isaac handed Marlon the phone.
Marlon looked once, jaw tightening hard enough to show at the hinge, then passed it to Ty without a word.
Ty took one look at the picture and stopped moving entirely. No joke. No noise. Just a flat, ugly kind of still.
"That's her bag?" he asked.
"Yeah," Isaac said.
"You sure."
"Yes."
Jadah leaned in from the side, saw the image, and took a step back like the screen had heat coming off it.
"Somebody took that right now," she said.
Nobody argued.
The timestamp on the image sat there like a thumb in the eye. Three minutes ago.
Marlon held his hand out. "Keys."
"To what."
"To my car."
Isaac stared at him.
Marlon stared back. "You're not getting in my passenger seat while I drive if that line is gonna live in your head the whole way. So either you drive, or we stand here and lose your ten minutes."
Ty pointed between them. "There. Problem solved. Creepy warning loophole. I hate that I'm helping, but there."
Isaac's pulse kicked once. Hard.
He hadn't said out loud that he could drive. Hadn't needed to. Marlon only knew because he knew things people forgot he knew. Who had a permit first. Who practiced in empty lots with whose cousin. Who took the wheel once when somebody else had too much to drink and acted like it was no big deal after.
Jadah said, "I'm coming."
"No," Isaac said.
"Yes."
"No."
She folded her arms tighter. "A man used my page to find you, came back to your building, and now there's a photo of your mother's bag hanging on a porch tied to your childhood address. I am already in this."
Ty nodded. "Unfortunately, she's right."
"I know she's right," Isaac snapped.
That shut him up for half a second.
Marlon was already holding his keys out. "Decide while moving."
Isaac took them.
The metal felt cold despite the heat.
Ty exhaled through his nose and looked up and down the block one more time. "I swear if this turns into some found-footage nonsense, I'm suing everybody."
"Get in the car," Marlon said.
They moved fast after that.
Ty jogged ahead to the Honda and yanked the rear door open. Jadah slid in behind the passenger seat without waiting for permission. Marlon took front passenger. Isaac got behind the wheel.
The interior smelled like old air freshener, fries, and the faint sun-baked plastic scent every car got by August whether it wanted to or not.
Isaac started the engine.
His phone buzzed again in the cupholder.
No one touched it.
"Address," he said.
Ty grabbed the paper from the envelope, read it, then looked up. "You really know where this is."
"Yeah."
"You haven't been there in how long?"
Isaac pulled away from the curb. "Years."
"Cool," Ty muttered. "Love our night."
Marlon opened the maps app without asking and typed the address in anyway.
Not because Isaac needed directions.
Because having a route glowing on the screen made it feel less like a bad dream and more like a place you could physically reach.
"Go left at the light," Marlon said.
Isaac didn't answer.
He drove.
The city outside kept doing what cities did—people on stoops, bikes cutting through bad gaps in traffic, somebody smoking by a bodega gate, buses breathing at corners. It all looked normal enough to be insulting.
Ty twisted around in his seat to look at Jadah. "You got anything else you forgot to mention?"
She glared at the back of his head. "You ask questions like a cop with a concussion."
"That's not a no."
"No," she said flatly. "I don't."
"Did the guy say your mother's name?" Marlon asked Isaac without looking away from the road ahead.
"No."
"Did he say what he thought you had?"
"No."
"Did he say what 'it' was?"
"No."
Ty made a helpless sound. "Amazing. Incredible. Huge fan of the information situation."
Isaac's phone buzzed again.
They all looked at it this time.
Unknown number.
He picked it up at the next red light.
One new text.
ALONE MEANS ALONE
Ty read it upside down and immediately flipped the sender off through the windshield. "Eat glass."
"Helpful," Jadah said.
"Thank you."
Isaac locked the phone and dropped it back into the cupholder.
Marlon said, "We turn around?"
"No."
Ty looked at him. "Brother."
"No," Isaac repeated.
"Because you think they're bluffing?"
Isaac's hands tightened on the wheel.
Because if they were watching enough to know who saw the note, they already knew he wasn't alone. Because if they wanted him alone, they'd had cleaner ways to force it. Because his mother's bag was on that porch.
Or something that looked enough like it to work.
He hated that last part most.
What if it wasn't hers?
What if it was?
He said, "Because if they wanted to stop me for bringing people, they would've done it already."
Marlon glanced at him once. Not agreement. Not disagreement either. Just logging it.
Ty rubbed at his face. "I need a better class of friend."
"You volunteered," Jadah said.
"You are not helping me."
She looked out the window. "I'm helping myself."
That was probably true.
The light changed. Isaac drove on.
Block by block, the streets got quieter.
Not empty. Just older somehow. More porch lights, fewer storefronts. Smaller houses crowded close. Fences leaning into hedges. Cars parked up on cracked curbs. The city pulling in on itself.
Isaac knew this route even before the map told him anything.
His body knew it before his head wanted to admit it.
That gas station used to have a red ice machine out front.
That corner church used to run fish fries on Fridays.
That narrow brick house had once had a mean dog that threw itself at the chain-link every afternoon at five like it had an appointment.
Little useless fragments surfacing one after another. Memory didn't care whether it was welcome.
He turned right.
Then left.
Then slowed without meaning to.
"There," he said.
Nobody needed him to say it.
The house sat halfway down the block under a dead streetlamp.
Small. Narrow. Same cheap siding from the photograph, only dirtier now. The porch had sunk a little more on one side. Railing warped. Front steps uneven. The old plant pot really was broken near the door, one half tipped on the boards like something had kicked through it.
And hanging from the porch light, swinging almost imperceptibly in the warm night air, was his mother's bag.
Ty let out a quiet, disbelieving "nah."
Isaac parked half a house down and killed the engine.
Nobody moved.
The block around them was too still.
Not silent—TV noise leaked from somewhere, a baby cried two houses over, somebody shut a trunk down the street—but the stretch right around that porch felt emptied out. Like a mouth holding its breath.
"No cars," Marlon said.
No gray sedan. No obvious watchers.
That didn't help.
Jadah leaned forward between the seats. "Don't walk straight up."
Ty twisted around to stare at her. "Oh, now she's tactical."
"Shut up."
Isaac kept his eyes on the porch.
The bag looked wrong from here.
Not fake.
Wrong.
The strap was twisted. One side hung lower than it should. Like somebody had tossed it there quick instead of setting it.
He was out of the car before anyone said anything else.
"Isaac—"
Marlon's voice followed him, but he was already on the sidewalk.
The air smelled like cut grass, hot pavement, and something faintly chemical drifting from somebody's garage.
He crossed the street without hurrying.
Don't walk straight up.
Jadah was right, for once.
So he didn't take the center path. He cut across the edge of the lawn, staying off the front steps until he got close enough to see the porch boards clearly.
One board near the top step was split fresh down the middle.
His eyes moved automatically.
Front window: dark.
Side window: blinds bent, no light.
Porch: empty except for the broken pot and the bag.
No sound from inside.
Behind him, car doors opened.
Of course they did.
He didn't turn around. "Stay there."
Ty answered immediately. "No."
Marlon said, "We're behind you, not on you."
Jadah didn't say anything. But he heard her door shut too.
Isaac went up the steps slowly.
The wood complained under his weight in the exact same places it used to.
That hit him harder than seeing the house had.
Memory in your eyes was one thing. Memory under your feet was different.
At the top, he reached for the bag.
Brown faux leather. Scuffed corner. Small ink mark near the zipper where his mother had stabbed it with a pen months ago and cursed for ten straight minutes.
Real.
Definitely real.
His stomach turned.
He opened it right there.
Wallet.
Receipt crumpled at the bottom.
Lip balm.
Her work ID clipped inside.
No phone.
No keys.
Ty had come farther up the walk than Isaac wanted. "Tell me that's not actually hers."
Isaac didn't answer.
That answered it.
Marlon was on the sidewalk, eyes moving over the house and street instead of the bag. Good. At least one of them was still looking outward.
Jadah stood by the curb with her arms wrapped around herself, staring at the front door like it might remember her from some other life.
Isaac stepped back off the porch.
The front lock was gone.
Not missing. Replaced. Newer metal catching the porch light.
Back door, the note had said.
Of course.
He looked down the narrow side yard.
Tall weeds. Fence leaning inward. One trash can on its side. No motion.
"We should call the police," Jadah said.
Ty laughed once, sharp and humorless. "And say what? Hello, someone staged an emotionally manipulative scavenger hunt at my friend's abandoned childhood house?"
She snapped, "People say that like cops are only for after you're dead."
"And you say things like you trust them."
"Both of you stop," Marlon said.
Isaac barely heard them.
He was staring at the side yard and hearing the text again.
BACK DOOR.
TEN MINUTES.
He checked the time.
Two minutes left.
That felt deliberate enough to make his skin crawl. As if the countdown had never been about getting here in time. Just about watching whether he would obey.
He reached into his pocket and closed his fingers around the brass key.
"I'm checking the back."
Ty started up the walkway. "We are checking the back."
Isaac turned to him. "If there's somebody in there—"
"Then there's somebody in there," Ty said, voice suddenly flat. "You think I'm letting you go around that house alone after all this?"
Marlon came up the grass, expression set now. "I go with him. You stay where you can see the street."
Ty stared at him. "Why do I get porch duty?"
"Because you run your mouth loud enough to call for help without a phone."
"That is profiling."
"It's accuracy."
Jadah looked at Isaac. "I'm not staying in the car."
He believed her.
He also didn't have time to fight her.
"Fine," he said. "You stay with Ty. Eyes on the street. If you see that sedan, you yell before you think."
Ty lifted a hand. "Finally, a task suited to my gifts."
Isaac and Marlon moved.
The side yard was tighter than Isaac remembered. The fence on one side had lost two slats. The weeds brushed at his calves. Something brittle cracked under Marlon's shoe.
At the back corner of the house, both of them stopped.
The rear porch light was on.
Yellow, dim, and steady.
The back door stood open three inches.
Not kicked in. Not broken.
Just waiting.
Isaac's whole body went still.
Marlon's voice came low. "You hear anything?"
Isaac listened.
A refrigerator hum from inside.
Some faint electric buzz.
Then—
one soft thump overhead.
Both of them looked up at the second-floor window at the same time.
Dark.
Another sound.
Not a thump this time.
A drag.
Slow.
Across the floor inside.