**ELENA POV**
The house feels wrong.
Not loud-wrong. Not obvious. Just… shifted. Like a picture frame tilted a fraction of an inch. Like air that’s been disturbed and hasn’t settled back into place yet. The kind of wrong you feel in your teeth before your brain catches up. I stand in the kitchen with my hands wrapped around a mug that’s gone cold and try to tell myself I’m imagining it.
I don’t succeed.
The silence presses in around me, thicker than it should be. The house isn’t asleep. It’s waiting.
I notice the glass first.
It’s sitting on the dining table, catching the light from the overhead fixture, clear and harmless and utterly misplaced. I stop mid-step so abruptly the coffee inside my mug sloshes. My heart skips hard enough to make me dizzy. I know exactly where I left that
