Chapter 1 - THE NOTE UNDER NOAH’S PLATE
At Noah Caruso’s eighth birthday party inside his father Dominic’s New Jersey estate, maid Hannah Reed notices the boy’s unusual fear whenever Dominic’s fiancée, Madison Shaw, approaches him. Noah refuses to blow out his candles and secretly hides a note beneath his dinner plate. When the note falls, Madison deliberately steps on Hannah’s hand trying to seize it, immediately making Dominic suspicious.
Hannah later reads Noah’s desperate message: MISS HANNAH, PLEASE DON’T LET ME SLEEP TONIGHT. Beneath it is a drawing of a clock showing 2:15.
Dominic and Hannah secretly watch Noah’s hallway that night. At exactly 2:15, Madison enters the boy’s bedroom wearing gloves and carries his apparently drugged body toward the basement. Confronted by Dominic, Noah reveals that Madison has been forcing him to “practice” saying he saw Dominic’s supposedly dead brother, Vincent.
A hidden room beneath the mansion contains cameras, photographs, scripted testimony, and old footage proving Vincent Caruso survived for at least six hours beyond his official time of death. An audio recording contains Vincent and Madison discussing a child whose memory had to remain buried.
Then Madison disappears during an eighteen-second power outage, Noah vanishes, and Dominic discovers recent photographs showing Vincent alive—as well as a teenage boy Hannah recognizes as her younger brother Ethan, who supposedly died when he was twelve.
Vincent calls the hidden room and claims Hannah’s family was paid to conceal something from Dominic seventeen years earlier. A secret compartment opens, revealing a yellow envelope addressed to Dominic Caruso and Hannah Reed, with instructions not to open it until Vincent is dead.
Before either can touch it, Noah’s voice comes from upstairs.
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Then Vincent’s follows.
Dominic’s dead brother has come home.
