Chapter 6 - The Drive to Erie
Three days after my return from St. Louis, David, Noah, and I piled into our aging sedan before dawn, pointing the hood north toward Erie, Pennsylvania. The sky was the color of wet slate, spitting a cold, freezing drizzle that glazed the interstate with a thin, treacherous layer of black ice.
None of us had slept much the night before. The apartment had felt different—not quite hostile, but fragile, like a house built on a fault line. The grocery bags had finally been unpacked, the roast cooked and eaten in near-total silence, but the burgundy shoes had been placed back inside their cardboard box and tucked away in the back of the hall closet. We had reached a silent consensus: we could not pretend the past didn't exist, but we couldn't let it destroy our present either.
Noah sat in the backseat, staring out the window as mile markers blurred past in the gray dawn. His fingers tapped a restless rhythm against his knee—the exact nervous habit I had known since he was a toddler. Every so often, I glanced back at him through the rearview mirror, catching his reflection in the dim dashboard lights.
“You okay back there, kiddo?” David asked softly, keeping his hands steady on the steering wheel.
“Just thinking,” Noah replied without turning his head. “About what we’re going to say when we get there.”
“We’re going to tell the truth,” I said, turning sideways in the passenger seat to look at him. “We’re going to meet Thomas and Sarah Miller, listen to their side of the story, and let them see that you grew up loved, cared for, and safe. Whatever happens next, we face it as a family.”
The private investigator’s report had provided an address for the Millers: a modest, well-kept suburban home on the outskirts of Erie, near the shores of Lake Erie where the wind blew cold off the water. Thomas Miller worked as a high school shop teacher; Sarah ran a small floral design business out of their garage. According to the file, they had spent two decades wondering what happened to their infant son during that stormy October night at Mercy General, never letting go of the hope that he might someday walk back into their lives.
As we exited the interstate and navigated the quiet, tree-lined residential streets of Erie, my stomach tightened into a hard, metallic knot. The GPS guided us down Maple Street until David eased the car to a stop in front of a single-story brick house with a neatly raked lawn and a faded blue Subaru parked in the driveway.
For several long moments, none of us opened our doors. The engine hummed quietly in the cold air, the windshield wipers swishing back and forth in a hypnotic rhythm.
“This is it,” David murmured, turning off the ignition.
Noah took a deep, shaky breath, his hand resting on the door handle. He looked at David, then at me, the fear in his eyes mixed with a desperate, burning need for closure.
May you like
“Let’s go,” Noah whispered.
We stepped out of the car together, our boots crunching against the frosty grass, and walked up the concrete walkway toward the front porch. I reached out and pressed the doorbell. Within seconds, heavy footsteps echoed behind the wooden door, and the lock turned with a sharp, echoing click.
