A police car was parked out front, the door ajar, the lights off. The front door hung open like a silent mouth.

At first, I thought there had been a household accident, maybe someone had fainted. But when I stepped inside, I saw the baby.

He stood in the middle of the kitchen, stiff and silent in striped pajamas, eyes wide open. He wasn’t crying, hardly moving. The bald police officer was crouched down to his level, his voice gentle but urgent:
— Tell me, kid, where’s your mom?

No answer. Only the steady ticking of a clock somewhere in the living room. The air felt frozen, heavy, almost too calm.

I stepped closer, quietly, and murmured:
— That’s not her child.

The man looked up at me, his face tense.
— You know her?

I nodded, my stomach twisting. Leïla lived here with her little brother. She sometimes babysat, but I had never seen this child before. And from the officer’s look, neither had he.

Nothing was out of place—no signs of struggle, no cries—just that deceptive peace clinging to the walls. The baby seemed oddly calm; he even gripped the officer’s fingers, as if seeking reassurance. That’s when I noticed the diaper bag propped against a stool. Next to it, a baby bottle still warm. And beneath it, half hidden, a folded piece of paper.

The officer grabbed his radio, muttered a few garbled words, then turned to me:
— Is there an exit behind the house?

That’s when I remembered what Leïla had told me a few days earlier: a girl had come to her in tears, begging her to keep a secret, asking for a favor she couldn’t refuse.

And suddenly, the silence of the house took on a different meaning. I approached the diaper bag. The note barely stuck out, yellowed by the kitchen light. My fingers trembled as I pulled it out.
A fine, nervous handwriting ran across a few lines:

“His name is Adam. Take care of him. I’ll come back when it’s all over. — L.”

L.? That wasn’t Leïla’s signature. Hers was round and childlike. This handwriting, on the contrary, breathed haste, fear.

The officer read it under his breath, frowning.
— You say this house belongs to your friend… and yet this note doesn’t seem to be from her. Are you sure she lives alone?

I wanted to answer, but an image flashed in my mind: Leïla, a few days ago, telling me about a girl “in distress,” someone she had taken in “just for one night.” She had insisted I tell no one.
I had laughed, thinking it was some complicated love story.

— She’s not alone, I whispered. At least… she wasn’t.

The officer signaled to his colleague outside. Footsteps echoed in the hallway, a door creaked open, then silence again—dense, almost suffocating.

— The car in the back, said the colleague as he returned. No keys, no papers, nothing in the glove box.

The baby let out a faint whimper, a sound so fragile it shattered the stillness. I instinctively reached out my arms, but the officer gestured for me to step back.
— We’ll take care of him, ma’am. Better not touch anything.

I backed away, but my eyes stayed on the child.
Something in his gaze… that lack of surprise, as if he knew this calm was only a pause before the storm.

Then, a sound.
Soft. Almost imperceptible.
A dull click from the end of the hallway.

The officer raised his hand, motioning his partner to wait, and moved forward slowly. I watched him. The kitchen light cast a yellow stripe across the floor, beyond which everything was swallowed by shadow.

— Ma’am, stay here.

His voice was firm, low.
But I took a step forward anyway.

At the end of the hallway, the bathroom door was ajar. A drop fell onto the tile. Then another.
Not water.
Red.

I felt dizzy.

The officer flung the door open—and his gasp vanished into the air.
A woman’s body lay by the bathtub. Leïla.
Her eyes stared at the ceiling. In her clenched hand, a broken bracelet dangled by a thread.

The baby, in the kitchen, started to cry again.

I wanted to run to him, but my legs wouldn’t move. Everything blurred, except one thought, echoing endlessly:

“I’ll come back when it’s all over.”

But if it wasn’t over… then the one who wrote those words was still out there.
And maybe, she wasn’t alone.