Amara's POV :
I had not slept.
The sun was coming up through my window and I was still on the couch surrounded by papers, my laptop was dead because I forgot to charge it, my eyes burning from staring at the same stuff for hours.
Ethan was in the hospital because of me, Sarah was gone because of me, and I still had nothing except theories that sounded insane when I said them out loud.
I looked at Dad's photo on the coffee table, the one I pulled out after Sarah left. He was smiling, arm around twelve-year-old me at some park, both of us squinting in the sun.
Three weeks after that photo he was dead.
I picked up his watch next to it, the one Mom gave me after the funeral even though she threw away everything else. Heavy, old watch, the kind you had to wind by hand. It stopped at 3:47, probably when he died, and I never wound it again.
Kept it frozen at that moment just like I had been frozen for sixteen years.
