Page 1 of The Hallows Boys

Prologue

SAGE

ONE MONTH AGO

I’m lounging on the couch watching a rerun of last night's episode of The Bachelorette, when I hear a knock on the front door. I pause the TV, stand up, and pad my way across the hardwood on bare feet to answer it.

A police officer with a full, black beard stands next to a woman wearing a grey suit – pencil skirt and blazer over a white button-down.

“Miss Lindman?” The woman questions, her face soft.

“Yeah?”

She reaches out a hand, as if in greeting, but there’s also sadness swimming in her gaze. I don’t shake her hand, I just stare at it with a boulder sitting in my gut. After a few heartbeats, she pulls her hand back to her side.

“Miss Lindman, my name is Paula, I’m a social worker for the state of California. And this”—she waves her hand to the police officer standing next to her—“is Officer Gillum. I’m afraid we have some bad news.”

She pauses to gauge my reaction, but I just swallow down the lump in my throat and try not to throw up the butterflies that are attacking my stomach. “Okay…?”

Paula takes a breath, her head tilting a little when she speaks again. “It’s your parents. They were in a car accident.”

Her voice fades away as the blood rushes to my ears, and I can barely hear the words leaving her mouth after that.

The room spins, so I hold on to the door to keep myself upright. I blink as I try to focus on what the woman before me is saying, something about her being my assigned social worker to figure out what happens now. I clear my throat once the noise of her voice stops in the background of my mind.

“I need to sit down.”

My gaze slides back up to the woman’s face when she nods. “Of course. Do you need someone to sit with you?”

I’m shaking my head before she finishes her sentence, desperate for them to get off of my porch and let me process. Once the shock wears off, it isn’t going to be a pretty picture. I can feel the anxiety simmering inside my chest, waiting to spill over the edge and suffocate me.

“Thank you for telling me.” My words feel forced, robotic, catatonic. I push the door closed, then lean my back up against it.

I suck down oxygen until my lungs feel like they’re going to burst inside my chest, then I blow it out slowly. I repeat this a dozen times until my head starts to feel normal. Standing up straight, I test my legs, and when I don’t crumble to the floor, I walk across the house again to sit back down on the couch.

The TV is paused on a dramatic scene of the Bachelorette, but I can’t even remember the men's names as my eyes glue to the frozen screen and zone out.

I disassociate from my reality, somehow realizing it’s happening as my eyes fill with tears. My vision blurs, so I slam my eyes shut, sending liquid streaming down my face.

Lacing my fingers together in my lap, I dig my nails into my flesh hard enough to bring me back to the present. My skin stings as I break through with my nails, and I snap my eyes back open to look at my hands. Blood is pooling around the fingernails that are still buried into my flesh, but it doesn’t feel the way I expected it to.

It stings, but it doesn’t hurt.

Not as much as my chest hurts, my head, my stomach.

“Fuck,” I rasp, releasing my hands from one another and running my fingers across my face to wipe away my tears.

I pull my phone from the coffee table and scroll through my contacts.

Who do I call?

Pressing on my uncle’s number, I put the phone to my ear. It rings five times before he answers.

“There's my favorite niece!” His warm voice booms through the phone, going straight to my gut, feeling like a punch.

I swallow down the sob in my throat. “Hi.”

“Are you okay, Sage?”

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