The House That Echoed With Silence
The wheels of my chartered turboprop kissed the runway at the small regional airfield outside Asheville just before dusk, and as the engines quieted to a low hum I felt the kind of relief that only comes when a relentless stretch of board meetings, investor calls, and cross-country negotiations finally loosens its grip on your shoulders, because for the first time in weeks I was not thinking about contracts or quarterly projections but about the promise of walking into my own home unannounced and finding nothing there except stillness.
I had chosen to return early without telling anyone, partly because I wanted to avoid the polite fuss my staff tended to make whenever I arrived, and partly because I was exhausted in a way that went deeper than sleep, the kind of fatigue that settles into your bones when you are always performing competence and certainty for everyone around you. My name is Gregory Alden Pierce, and although I had built a respected logistics consultancy from the ground up, turning a modest regional operation into a company that now advised shipping firms across the Southeast, my success had never quieted the persistent worry that followed me home each evening, especially where my son was concerned.
