Chapter 1 - The Impossible Return
I stared down at the contents of the largest stroller, my lungs completely forgetting how to draw in air.
Resting peacefully on a bed of dark velvet was a sleeping infant.
He was breathing softly, his tiny chest rising and falling in a rhythmic, comforting motion.
But the sight of a baby was not what made me scream and clutch my chest in horror.
The child was wrapped tightly in a hand-knitted, pale green blanket patterned with tiny giraffes.
It was the exact same blanket I had buried my son Noah in just three weeks ago.
I stumbled backward, my legs giving out as my knees hit the damp morning grass of my front lawn.
My mind violently rejected what my own eyes were desperately trying to process.
Noah was dead.
I had stood in the freezing rain and watched the cemetery workers lower his tiny white casket into the ground.
I had picked out the heavy marble headstone myself because my husband was too distraught to function.
Yet, the child in the black box shifted, letting out a soft, heartbreakingly familiar whimper.
I scrambled back to my feet and leaned over the stroller, trembling uncontrollably from head to toe.
I reached out, my cold fingers brushing gently against the baby's warm, soft cheek.
He opened his eyes, revealing the exact same striking shade of slate gray that I saw in the mirror every day.
Panic and a desperate, impossible hope warred fiercely inside my ribcage.
I gently lifted the edge of the green knitted blanket to check his left ankle.
Right there, resting just above his heel, was a birthmark shaped perfectly like a crescent moon.
It was Noah.
My dead son was somehow alive and breathing in my front yard.
But before I could even begin to process the miracle, a dark shadow fell over me.
I spun around to see a black SUV with tinted windows idling silently at the end of my driveway.
The rear window slowly rolled down, revealing the dark metallic barrel of a suppressed weapon pointing right at me.
Before I could shout for help, my cell phone buzzed violently in my coat pocket.
I answered it with a shaking hand, keeping my eyes fixed on the terrifying vehicle.
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A mechanized, distorted voice whispered a single, bone-chilling sentence through the speaker.
"You were never supposed to open that box."
