“You were shocked when your healthy mother died of stomach cancer in her early-70s, right? I wasn’t, because I saw why. I saw Chip do what he was doing, but I couldn’t get through to your mother. The only time I was ever able to was leaving that message on that answering machine. But sadly, she never listened to it.”

“Ch..Chi…Chip was her boyfriend?”

“I guess that’s what you would call it. I don’t really want to talk about that side of it. But that is what happened. Chip was a crazy man, but your mom didn’t realize it, and he stayed, hiding in that house after she passed. He was there the whole time you were there, but you just didn’t notice.”

I heard my dad’s voice begin to face.

“Dad?” I started calmly, but my voice grew with each second that passed before I heard from him through the speakers. “Dad? Dad?”

My question reached a high-pitched scream by the time the entire world around me started to fuzz and fade away.

The world came back to me in a flash, and it was cold. That was all I could initially feel. Just a deep feeling of cold.

My others senses would come back to me slowly and would reveal to me that I was lying on the ground on a frozen sidewalk in just that t-shirt and sweats. I tried to shake my head to grab some more sense, but it didn’t work. I was literally frozen.

“Miss,” a voice and a hardened face broke through my haze.