Dawn

Chapter Two: Echoes of the Past

The sun was bright, its warmth spilling through the kitchen windows and casting golden patches across the table where Isabella and her sister Kaye sat, sipping their coffee. The steady clink of their mugs and the occasional chirp from the garden outside were the only sounds punctuating the morning stillness. To an outsider, this was a perfect picture of peace—two sisters enjoying the simple pleasures of a quiet breakfast, unhurried, content.

But inside Isabella's mind, it was anything but peaceful.

The morning had dawned with a sense of disorientation that she couldn't shake. The vivid flashes from the previous night gnawed at her. She hadn't told Kaye what she had woken up to—cold, damp grass pressing against her skin, the hazy memory of her own hands stained with something dark, the sense of wrongness that seemed to envelop her. Even now, as the warmth of the coffee spread through her, the questions persisted. Why couldn't she remember? Why was there blood? Whose blood had it been?

Kaye, oblivious to her sister's inner turmoil, was flipping through her phone, lost in some article or message, while absently sipping her coffee. Isabella tried to focus on the mundane. The smell of the coffee, the faint aroma of eggs Kaye had fried earlier, the distant hum of cars passing by the house—it all felt too normal. The disjoint between her fractured memories and the routine of the morning made her even more uneasy.

She hadn't told Kaye about Mark's call. She didn't even know if she could trust her own recollection of it. It had been brief, strange. He hadn't said much—just that he needed to talk. But it had left her tense, uncomfortable in a way she couldn't quite explain, like she had missed something crucial. The unease from that conversation had led her to the tequila—something she rarely indulged in. She had hoped it would dull the anxiety, but it had left her with an unsettling blank space in her memory instead.

A sharp knock at the door shattered the silence. Isabella jumped, nearly spilling her coffee, while Kaye's phone slipped from her grasp and clattered onto the table. The knock came again, louder this time, rapid and urgent.

"I'll get it," Kaye said, already rising, her eyebrows knit in confusion as she hurried toward the door.

Isabella set her coffee down, her heart suddenly pounding in her chest. There was something about the frantic rhythm of the knock that made her stomach twist with dread. Her hands, still trembling, clenched into fists as she watched Kaye disappear down the hallway toward the front door.

The heavy banging continued, each knock echoing in the small house, growing more insistent by the second. It was too early in the day for any kind of casual visitor, and Isabella couldn't shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong.

Kaye opened the door, and the moment she did, a voice Isabella immediately recognized drifted into the kitchen—high-pitched, strained with panic. It was Emma.

"Is Isa here?" Emma's voice quivered, frantic and full of an emotion that made Isabella's blood run cold.

"She's in the kitchen," Kaye responded, her tone equally perplexed. "What's going on?"

Emma didn't answer. Instead, she rushed past Kaye, her footsteps fast and uneven as she hurried into the kitchen, her face pale, her eyes wide with terror.

The second Emma's gaze landed on Isabella, she let out a breath as though she had been holding it the entire time.

"Thank God," she gasped, her voice breathless, as if the relief of finding Isabella in one piece had loosened something inside her.

Isabella was on her feet before Emma could even reach her. "What's wrong?" Her voice came out sharper than she had intended, her nerves already frayed from the sense of unease she had been fighting all morning. "Emma, what happened?"