Three years ago, Alex Langford—darling of Wall Street, devoted husband, and perfect father—vanished without a trace. No note. No body. Just a half-empty closet, a crimson stain beneath the nursery rug, and the distinct, echoing sense that something was terribly wrong.

Now, the Langford estate sits like a glass coffin on the hill—pristine, polished, and rotting from the inside.

Ava Langford still lives there.

Wrapped in designer silk and sprayed with perfume that never fades, Ava drifts through the house like a dream that refuses to end. She laughs too sweetly. Cries when no one’s watching. And smothers her only remaining lifeline—her 17-year-old son Adrien—with love so intense it feels like a noose.

She kisses his forehead six times before bed. Waits outside his school in a Rolls-Royce every day. Tucks him in. Feeds him dinner like he’s still a child.

Adrien—tall, cold, adored—is unraveling.
The school calls him brilliant. His mother calls him “my baby.”
He doesn’t call her anything at all.

But the glass is cracking.

Someone walks the halls at night. Doors open when no one touches them. There’s a man in the security footage—one with Alex’s eyes, but not his smile. A forgotten journal turns up in Adrien’s room, scrawled with ink and obsession. And beneath the floorboards, something is ticking.

Everyone says Alex left. But Ava remembers that night.
She remembers the knock at the glass.
The way the lights went out.
The man in love with her who should never have been let in.

I don't know how to explain it, but… the house smelled like Ava.


Like citrus and vanilla and those fancy candles she burns that cost more than some people's rent.


There were new curtains. New bedsheets. New rugs. New pillows. I don't even know when she had the time to do all this—actually, I do. Probably in the twenty hours between hospital discharge and now, when a normal person would've rested. Ava Langford was not normal.


She was currently standing in my room holding a notebook labeled "My Baby's Comfort Masterplan."


"Of course I did. Trauma paint. It's a thing."


She pointed at the soft gray walls. "Calms the nervous system. I researched this."


I looked at the plush white couch under my window. The bookshelf full of all the books I never told her I wanted. The new sound system. The weighted blanket.


And right now, I wouldn't trade it for anything.


She crossed the room and wrapped her arms around me, clinging like a baby koala. "Do you feel safe here?"


She loosened slightly. "Good. That's what I was going for. Mild oxygen deprivation from motherly love."


Then she stepped back, brushed invisible dust off my shoulder, kissed my cheek, fixed my hair—and then yelled:


A distant groan came from down the hall.


"No one's safe," she declared. "This house is now a love fort. And I will smother every single person in it."


By the time we walked into the living room, Alex was already sinking into the couch with the weariness of a man who'd just filed forty emails and been cuddled through twenty of them.


He looked up. "She tackled me while I was brushing my teeth."


"I missed his shoulders," Ava said shamelessly. "They were lonely without my affection."


She walked over, plopped right onto his lap, and looped her arms around his neck. "Tell me you love me."


"I love you," Alex muttered, smiling like he'd never stopped.


She turned to me. "You hear that, Adrien? That's romance."


I rolled my eyes but sat down on the other side of the couch anyway. She instantly pulled my legs into her lap and draped the blanket over all three of us like we were one big human burrito.


It was stupid. It was loud. It was too much.


Chapter 27 - My Mother, the Blanket