PART 1
“Your son doesn’t deserve to sit with us, so let him eat standing up like the freeloader he is.”
That was the first sentence Gabriel Lawson heard the moment he walked into his home that night.
He had returned three days early from a hauling trip to Phoenix because his cargo load had been canceled. It was almost eleven o’clock at night, and the house in a quiet neighborhood of Columbus was completely dark. There was no television playing, no music sounding, and no lights on in the kitchen. The only sound was the heavy thumping of a washing machine in the utility room.
Gabriel dropped his heavy backpack by the front door and followed the noise down the hallway.
Lucas, his sixteen-year-old son, was bent over a plastic bucket while hand-scrubbing a dirty sweatshirt. His small fingers were bright red from the freezing water. Beside him, the washing machine was spinning violently, filled to the brim with someone else’s clothes.
“Where is your stepmother?” Gabriel asked softly.
Lucas raised his head as if he had just seen a ghost appearing out of nowhere.
“They went on a vacation to Miami,” Lucas whispered softly. “Candice, her mother, her sister, and Wyatt went together.”
Wyatt was Lucas’s cousin, a boy of the exact same age who had been living in their house for nearly a year.
“And they left you completely alone here?” Gabriel asked.
“They are coming back on Sunday evening,” Lucas replied. “They explicitly told me that I had to have everything clean before they return.”
