Something Worth Finding
The Mercers were a good family.
That's actually where the trouble started.
Dad coached Little League on Saturdays and never missed a recital. Mom ran the hospitality team at church and kept the calendar color-coded. Their oldest was in everything. Their youngest had a gift for music nobody had quite figured out what to do with yet. From the outside, they looked like a family that had figured it out.
But inside the house, something was missing. And nobody could name it.
The Sign Above The Door
Calloway & Sons — Built on Trust.
Marcus Calloway walked past it every morning without looking up. He’d stopped seeing it a long time ago — the way you stop seeing a picture that’s hung on the same wall your whole life. It was just part of the building. Part of the furniture. Part of a story he’d inherited but wasn’t sure he still believed.
Inside, the company hummed along the way it always had. Forty-two employees. Three divisions. A client list that filled two binders on the shelf behind his desk. From the outside, Calloway & Sons looked exactly like what it was supposed to be — a successful, stable, second-generation business doing solid work in a mid-sized city that needed it.
But Marcus was tired in a way that sleep couldn’t fix.