“If you are reading this, then I am in mortal danger. Unfortunately, if you are reading this, you are also in mortal danger. I have left this note specifically where only I could find it. Yes, me. You. Us. We are one and the same.

I’m sure you have many questions, and I likely have just as many answers. However, you won’t be able to hear any of them if you don’t first get me out of this alive. Just in case your own tenuous mortality isn’t enough to entice you into a rescue mission—and, let’s be real, we both know it’s probably not—then let your thirst for the truth drive you onward.

As you’re reading this, time is ticking on. I don’t know how much of it we have left. Meet me where I began: the stop sign by 124 West Maple. Hurry. It will soon be too late.”

You stare at the letter, crumpled where your fingers have grasped onto it for dear life. The stop sign by 124 West Maple. The one you ran through last summer, the one that didn’t stop you from sending your car straight into traffic, the one that watched as your car was crushed like a tin can. You never should have made it out of that alive, but you did. You think. Unless?

It’s a trick. A scam. Plenty of people know what happened last August. It was in all of the newspapers. You had made your fair share of enemies from strangers, people who never knew you but somehow still knew that they hated any kind of person who would see that red octagon and blast straight through. Lucky, they said, that the vehicle you hit was a heavy, commercial truck. Lucky you didn’t cause some other family a heartbreak. The fact that you made it out of there with a heartbeat was a sheer miracle, and they said you were lucky, too. But you weren’t so sure.

It’s late. You were rifling through your pajama drawer when you found the note. Ten million horrible things could happen to you if you traverse the streets alone in the dark.

Maybe that’s a reason to stay home.

And yet. Maybe that’s a reason to go.

You find yourself by the front door, pulling on your old rain boots. You never could stand to let a mystery go unsolved.