At 5:30 in the morning, the world felt frozen in place.
The sky was still black. The wind screamed through the neighborhood like something alive, rattling windows and shaking tree branches against rooftops. According to my weather app, the temperature had plunged to minus thirty-eight degrees with the wind chill.
Most people were still asleep.
I wasn’t.
Something had been keeping me half-awake all night—the storm, maybe, or the strange feeling that comes before something changes your life forever.
