The morning sunlight filtered through pale curtains in a quiet suburb of New Orleans, spilling gold across marble floors that reflected wealth but not warmth. Gordon Irving rose before his alarm, sitting on the edge of his bed with a strange heaviness pressing against his chest. His schedule for the day was packed with meetings, conference calls, and site visits across three states, yet something unseen urged him to break routine. He had lived by calendars and contracts for so long that ignoring them felt like stepping off a cliff, but that morning he did exactly that, calling his assistant to cancel everything with a calm voice that surprised even himself.
By mid morning, Gordon’s black sedan rolled through the gates of his estate, a sprawling house built of glass and limestone, impressive to visitors and hollow to those who lived inside. He expected quiet halls and empty rooms, the same sterile peace that greeted him each day after work. What he found instead was laughter drifting from the dining room, bright and careless, echoing against high ceilings that had not heard such sound in years.