film—from Ewan the dreamy Scottish actor to the scene in which someone dove into a toilet. He reached down, took her by the hand, each finger tingling as they brushed against her milky white teenage skin. Their gazes locked, tingles spreading from their fingertips, across their hands, up the backs of their necks, down their spines, ending at a curl in their toes.
That’s when he felt it. His fingers intertwined with hers; he could feel her trembling like a scared kitten. While he’d noticed it earlier, he hadn’t really thought much of it, thinking that she was just cold, a frail leaf shaking in the breeze of the ICE-COLD AIR-CONDITIONING advertised in block letters on the outside wall of the single-screen theater. No. She was nervous; she was scared of screwing this up. And he smiled, for he knew that she was his.
It was a perfect first kiss. He pulled her tight, kissing her as deeply and passionately as he knew how. Years later they would both laugh at the two stupid kids trying their first hand at necking, but in that moment—in each other’s arms—it was bliss. Over time they’d get it. And years later on a hot, humid day in April, they stood before a courtyard full of their family and friends, formally announcing to the world, “Till death do us part.” And they meant it. Every word.
And with that he took her into his arms, kissing her as deeply and as passionately as he knew how. This time he got it right. Then the preacher announced them to the world. Jared and Tiffany Thatcher.
While they had never lived very far out in the sticks, neither expected to end up downtown in a condominium high-rise built for aspiring yuppies and college kids with rich parents—on the seventeenth floor, with a view that looked out over the lake, onto the southern, hipper part of town. It was expensive, especially with a baby on the way, but worth it. They were buying into the cliché, becoming a bedtime story for little girls, proof that dreams do, in fact, come true, that someday your prince will come, and everything else that goes with that.
They didn’t mind being a cliché or a bedtime story. Not one bit.
It was a Sunday on which their first and only child was born. He was strong, healthy, and had all the right numbers of fingers and toes. “A perfect specimen of the Thatcher genes,” as Jared put it. They had excelled at making a perfect baby; his name, on the other hand, had proved to be a bit of a hang-up. They’d beaten themselves silly trying to think of something clever, something charming, something that perfectly expressed the love they shared. But nothing came. And as the nurse approached them with the birth certificate, they sat huddled together with their beautiful, swaddling-wrapped baby boy, Jared waving her off, asking for a few minutes more.
“Can you believe it?” he asked his wife. “How did we get here?”
They gazed in wonder at their son, lost in memories of that first kiss. That night. That movie. And it hit them. “Ewan,” they both said at once. Their eyes locked, Jared taking his wife into his arms, kissing her as deeply and passionately as he knew how. It was perfect. It said everything. Ewan. The boy who would change their lives forever.
Ewan Thatcher never cried, he never wailed, he only cooed. And depending on the tone, pitch, and warble, Tiffany knew whether he was hungry, needed changing, or just wanted to be held. He loved to be held, and Tiffany never wanted to put him down. “You’re gonna spoil that kid,” Jared would say, trying to hide his beaming smile. “No one gets to spend more time in your arms than me.”
“You’re the spoiled one,” Tiffany snarked back playfully. “You had your time. It’s his turn now.”
It was an uncommonly beautiful evening the night that Tiffany would last set eyes upon her son. All the windows in the house were open, a slight breeze brushing in past the curtains, tickling the skin with butterfly kisses. She thought nothing of the open windows; they were on the seventeenth floor and Ewan could barely roll over by himself.
Tiffany had just put Ewan back down after a late feeding, humming an off-key tune to coax him back to sleep.
And if she were listening, rather than humming, she would have heard the faint, distant sound of skittering claws across polished concrete.
Just outside her window,