That’s when she heard it upstairs—a quick rattle, then the dull thunk of a window settling into its frame. Not a creak. Not the house shifting. A window closing. Her spine went rigid. Marcus was asleep. And no one else should’ve been moving up there.
The sound came from the spare room—the one she’d turned into a kind of training space, the place she stored the straps, the mats, the equipment she sometimes helped Marcus use downstairs. Julia climbed the stairs with her heart hammering, moving quietly, one step at a time, as if the wrong noise might invite someone to look back at her.