Her certainty only deepened his confusion. Ethan thanked her, but his mind raced as he turned back toward the slope. The address wasn’t a mistake—he’d read it a dozen times. Yet it simply didn’t exist. He lingered there, staring at the empty space where something should have been, wondering what could erase an entire place without a trace.
On his way back through town, he stopped a delivery driver, then a pair of schoolkids, each time asking the same question: Riverside Street, number twenty-five. Every answer was the same—confused looks, polite shrugs, even a laugh or two suggesting he had the wrong place.