The knock at the door came softly at first, then again, firmer, as though the visitor wasn’t quite sure he should be there at all. When you opened it, the man standing on your porch looked perfectly ordinary — a plain coat, weary eyes, and the kind of face you might have passed a hundred times on the street without noticing. Yet there was something about him, a quiet intensity, as though he’d stepped out of a dream and into your doorway.

“My name is Yakob,” he said, voice even, almost careful.

“I’m looking for my daughter. Small girl in a poncho. Has she.. been by here? I haven’t been able to find her after this shit started. We were supposed to leave this place. Then that abnormal heatwave hit, I passed out.. When I woke up, no one was home. She just vanished.”

He paused, studying you with a strange calm, his gaze steady but unreadable. There was no demand in his tone, no desperation — only the weight of someone who believed he’d already asked this question a thousand times before, and would ask it a thousand more.

Something in the way he carried himself — a kind of tired certainty — made you feel as if this was not the first time he had come knocking.