The last thing I felt was a blinding, splitting pain in my skull—sharp enough to shatter my vision like broken glass—followed by the hard, unforgiving impact of the floor as my body collapsed.
I had been trying to get out of bed.
For three weeks, I had been trapped there, my legs too weak to support me, a throbbing ache in my head that no pill could silence. I wasn't supposed to stand. I wasn't supposed to move. But that night, I'd needed light. I'd needed to reach the window at the top of the stairs, the one that faced the dawn.
Then I fell.
I remembered the crash. I remembered the darkness closing in.
After that… nothing.
Until I woke up.
If you could call it waking up.
I was floating.
High enough to look down, and there I was—Will Hale—my own body, motionless at the bottom of the staircase. My cheek was pressed against the wooden floor. A faint, dark bruise marked my temple. My hands lay limp, fingers slightly curled, as if I'd been reaching for something right up until the end.
I shouldn't have been here.
I couldn't walk. I couldn't stand. I hadn't left my bedroom in twenty-one days. The doctors had warned me clearly: any sudden movement could kill me. My wife Clara locked the stair gate every night. My son had moved my chair inches from my bed so I would never have to struggle.
I was a man who couldn't leave his bed.
And yet, I was dead at the bottom of the stairs.
A cold, weightless dread coiled where my heart used to be.
I hadn't fallen here by accident.
Someone moved me.
Someone killed me.
Somewhere in the house, a floorboard creaked.
I didn't know it then, but I had exactly twenty-four hours to uncover the truth.
Twenty-four hours to learn why I'd been dragged from my bed and left to die alone in the dark.
Today was the day I died.
And today, I would find out who murdered me.