At 2:03 in the morning, my phone lit up beside my bed.
I answered expecting a wrong number, an automated message, or perhaps some other meaningless interruption in the middle of the night.
Instead, I heard a tiny whisper.
“Grandpa?”
It was Mia.
My eight-year-old granddaughter.
Her voice was so faint that for a second I could barely recognize it.
I sat upright immediately.
“Mia? Why are you awake?”
There was a long pause.
Then she whispered, “I’m thirsty.”
At first, those words sounded almost ordinary.
A child awake too late.
Maybe a nightmare.
Maybe a glass of water.
But then I asked the question any grandfather would ask.
“Where are your mom and dad?”
Her answer changed everything.
“I can’t wake them.”
“They’re not here.”
I felt the sleep disappear from my body.
“What do you mean they’re not there?”
“They went away.”
Her voice trembled.
“They took Leo.”
Leo was her ten-year-old brother.
I knew my son, Austin, and his wife, Monica, had planned a vacation.
I knew they were taking Leo on a Caribbean cruise.
