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| Free Story Friday: The Replacement |
A new original tale every week—twisted, terrifying, and inspired by the darkest legends you thought you knew.
Chase left on a Friday morning, the truck loaded with coolers and sleeping bags and the low-grade anticipation of men who spend too much of their year behind desks. Laura stood on the porch in her robe while Luca, six years old and barefoot, pressed himself against his father's leg.
“Bring me something,” Luca said.
“Like what? A pine cone?”
“A cool rock. With gold in it.”
Chase laughed and ruffled his hair, then limped toward the truck. The old knee injury flared in cold weather, and the October morning had a bite to it. He threw his pack in the bed and turned to Laura.
“Three days, Queen,” he said. That was what he called her when he was feeling tender. She didn't know why it started. Probably something stupid. It had stuck anyway.
“Try not to drink all of Dave's beer before Saturday,” she said.
He grinned—that particular grin, half-sheepish, half-proud—and got in the truck. Ranger, their four-year-old shepherd mix, chased the tires down the driveway until Chase turned onto the road and disappeared.
Laura went inside and made more coffee. The weekend spread out ahead of her: bills, a grocery run, whatever movie Luca wanted to watch twice. She didn't mind it. That was the truth she rarely said out loud—that she didn't mind the quiet. She loved Chase in the specific, unglamorous way you love someone after twelve years: not passionately, but dependably. Like weather.
He came back Sunday evening, and something was wrong.
Laura couldn’t have said exactly what, at first. The truck pulled in at the right time. Chase got out wearing his green flannel, the sleeves pushed up the way he always wore them. But he didn’t limp crossing the yard. He moved fluidly, evenly, like a man who had never had a bad knee in his life.
She told herself he’d been sitting in the truck a long time. Sometimes that helped.
He hugged her at the door—she felt the familiar weight of him, the breadth of his shoulders—but he held on a beat longer than usual. When he pulled back, he looked at her face with a kind of focused attention that made her want to check for something behind her.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey yourself. How was it?”
“Good.” A half-second pause. “Warm enough until last night.”
Luca came pelting down the hallway. Chase watched him approach for just a moment before opening his arms. It was only a fraction of a second. Long enough to register. Not long enough to name.
She was reading into things. He was tired. They’d probably been up late.
Ranger trotted in from the yard, tail up, and then stopped. The dog’s hackles rose in a slow wave from neck to tail. A low sound built in his throat, not quite a growl.
Chase crouched slowly. Held out his hand, palm up. Waited.
He had never been that patient with the dog.
After a long moment, Ranger stepped forward and sniffed, then allowed himself to be petted. His tail moved, cautiously at first, then with more conviction. Laura watched it happen and felt something in her chest loosen that she hadn’t realized was tight.
See, she thought. Nothing wrong.
He refused the beer she offered.
“Tastes off to me right now. I’ll just have water.”
He didn’t turn on the game. Sunday night football, something he’d watched with the same religious constancy since Laura had known him. When she mentioned it, he said he’d already checked the score and wasn’t feeling it.
He did the dishes without being asked. Fixed the loose cabinet hinge that had been rattling since August.
When Luca knocked over a glass of juice and it spread in a bright orange rush across the table, he froze. His shoulders lifted instinctively, his mouth tightening the way it always did before Chase’s irritation came.
Laura felt it too—that brief tightening in the room.
Chase only said, “Grab a towel, buddy.”
No edge. No sigh.
Luca blinked, almost confused, then slid off his chair to get paper towels.
He cleaned it carefully.
He didn’t flinch.
He’s just trying, Laura told herself. He’s putting in effort.
That night she asked how Dave was doing, whether his back had held up on the trip.
“Fine,” he said.
Then: “Yeah, he’s good.” The pause between the words was small enough that she might have imagined it.
She asked how Ranger got his name.
He looked at her for a second too long.
“Luca named him.”
Which was true. But Chase had always claimed it was his idea first—that Luca had only agreed. He’d told that story a dozen times at dinner parties, gesturing with a cold beer in his hand like it mattered.
It had mattered to him.
He didn’t correct himself now.
He let it go.
She woke at 2 a.m. The room was still, the night pressed flat against the windows. Beside her, Chase lay on his back, arms at his sides, eyes open.
Looking at the ceiling.
Or maybe looking at her.
She didn’t move. She kept her breathing slow and even and watched through her lashes. His face didn’t shift. His chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm that felt practiced.
Eventually, she closed her eyes first.
In the morning he made eggs. He didn’t snore.
Chase snored.
She had twelve years of evidence. Twelve years of elbowing him at 3 a.m., of earplugs on the nightstand, of a white-noise machine they’d bought in a moment of desperation. He snored like something geological, constant and immovable. It had been one of the small grievances of her life that had, without her noticing, become one of its textures.
This quiet felt borrowed.
At dinner that week, Luca put down his fork and said, without preamble, “Dad doesn’t yell anymore.”
Chase smiled.
“Trying to be better, bud.”
Luca nodded, satisfied, and went back to his pasta.
Laura watched her son’s face—open, untroubled, happy in a way she hadn’t seen in a while—and felt something move through her that she refused to name.
The dent in the garage wall was from three years ago. Chase had backed the truck in too fast, miscalculated, put a clean crescent-shaped mark in the drywall at bumper height. He’d been furious with himself. They’d argued about fixing it, then stopped arguing and just left it.
She mentioned it casually one morning, asking if he’d finally thought about patching it.
He followed her gaze to the wall.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll pick up some spackle.”
No story. No rueful shake of his head. No retelling of how it had happened. Just agreement.
Like it was any other dent.
She waited for him to add something. A memory. A joke. A fragment of irritation.
He didn’t.
That night she sat in the bathroom with the door locked, hands pressed flat on her thighs, and tried to slow her breathing.
There had to be an explanation.
People forgot things. People changed. People decided to let old arguments go.
She stayed there longer than she meant to.
When she went back to bed, she lay on the far edge of the mattress and listened to him breathe.
The knock came on a Thursday, eleven days after the camping trip.
It was nearly ten o’clock. Luca was in bed. Laura was halfway through a chapter, one leg tucked beneath her, the house quiet in the way she had started to trust again when the sound began—fists against the front door, hard and frantic, the rhythm of someone who had been running.
Ranger exploded into noise. Not his warning bark for deer in the yard, but something sharp and unsettled. His claws scraped against the hardwood.
In the kitchen, Chase set down his coffee.
Laura stood, the book slipping closed in her hand.
She opened the door.
The man on the porch was mud-caked to the knee. His flannel was torn at the shoulder. He smelled of woodsmoke and sweat and cold air and something green and alive. When she saw his face, her vision tightened at the edges.
It was Chase’s face.
The scar near his temple. The crease between his brows. The mouth she had kissed that morning.
He was limping.
“Laura.” His voice cracked. “Laura, I don’t know what happened. I woke up and I couldn’t—I’ve been in those woods for—”
He stumbled forward and she stepped back without meaning to.
“Where is he? What did he do to you? Are you and Luca—”
Footsteps behind her.
Chase came into the doorway slowly. He rested one hand lightly on her shoulder.
“You weren’t supposed to come back,” he said.
Not angry. Not raised. Just certain.
The man on the porch lunged.
Laura screamed.
Ranger hurled himself between them, barking at both now, frantic and confused. Luca appeared at the top of the stairs in his pajamas, small hands gripping the railing.
The room fractured into motion and noise.
When the police arrived, the man from the porch was sitting on the steps with dirt ground into his palms and blood slipping from a cut above his eye. He was shaking. He kept trying to stand, trying to speak over the officers.
Inside, Chase stood steady in the hallway. His voice was even. Measured. He used words like “disoriented.” “Stress.” “I’m worried about my family.”
Luca stood behind Laura.
He did not move toward either of them.
Laura looked at her son’s face. Then at the man on the porch—wild-eyed, limping, desperate in a way that felt too large for the night.
Then at the one beside her.
Calm.
Present.
Solid.
She told the officers she didn’t know the man at the door.
That he had forced his way inside.
The words felt strange in her mouth.
But they were simple.
They made sense.
She watched them lead him away.
Weeks passed. November turned the yard brown.
Laura replayed it the way you replay an accident—frame by frame, trying to locate the second where a different outcome might still have been possible. She had been frightened. Luca had been frightened. The decision had arrived fast and left no space to examine it.
She told herself she had done what anyone would do.
He grilled dinner on Saturday and helped Luca with a school project about volcanoes. He laughed at the right moments. He was patient with the dog. He remembered his mother’s birthday.
The house felt steadier.
Quieter.
He was, in measurable ways, better.
That was the thing she kept circling back to—the small, undeniable improvements. Twelve years with a man who was good but inconsistent. Loving, but prone to sharp edges. Present, then distracted. This version did not leave dishes in the sink. This version never raised his voice. This version had not, once, made Luca flinch.
Luca slept through the night now.
That mattered.
Some nights she would almost convince herself there had never been two of them standing in the doorway. That she had been mistaken. That stress had distorted what she thought she saw.
The mind did strange things under pressure.
She was mostly convinced.
Mostly.
She woke again at 2 a.m. The room was dark and still.
Beside her, Chase lay on his back, eyes open.
He turned his head and looked at her. He smiled—gentle, patient, unsurprised.
“I’m trying, Laura,” he said.
She nodded.
Closed her eyes.
The house had been quiet lately.
Luca slept through the night.
The cabinet hinge no longer rattled. The dishes were never left in the sink. There were no sharp words at dinner.
Outside the window, in the dark line of trees, something moved once through the dead November leaves. An uneven step. A drag.
Or maybe just wind.
She did not move.
She did not open her eyes.
She never got up.
If the person you love could be better… would you question it?
© 2025 Karen Cody. All rights reserved. This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog. Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission. This tale may appear in a future special collection.
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