Chapter 1 – Prologue

Mia was alive! After almost three years, Ethan had gotten an email. When he first saw it in his in inbox on his iPhone 6, he thought it was some kind of cruel joke from his best friend and college roommate Dan. However even Dan wouldn't have been that much of a prick. Besides, he was right next to him chugging beer with one of their other friends, Matt, who was hardly looking away from the Texas Rangers game on TV at the crowded sports bar.

Ethan paused. This couldn't be real. He could still remember when one police officer told him that Mia was probably dead. He recalled a couple months later when his older brother had told him that he should move on with his life.

He could never move on and yet this email… What if it was some kind of joke? Dan was drunk and it didn't take long to type up an email on your phone.

But he opened it despite that. The email didn't say much, but at the same time it told him everything he needed to know. For now, at least.

"Ethan, what's with your face?" Dan slurred. He took another sip of his beer, accidentally spilling some of it on the chipped oak bar in the process. It wasn't the first time it had happened that night. Occasionally a waitress would come over and glare at him, but Dan never cared.

Ethan had planned to give the waitress a good tip when they left, but now none of that mattered.

"Seriously, Ethan. What's up?" Dan questioned.

Ethan stared at him. He tried to get the words out. Mia was alive. She was in Dulvey, Louisiana. He had to go get her. Despite how much he tried to spit them out, they wouldn't form. He couldn't utter a single word.

Instead he pretty much fell off his bar stool.

"Dude!" Dan said, laughing as he tried to grab him which just led to Dan knocking over his beer. It dripped onto the floor causing a mess. A nearby bartender shot them an evil look. Ethan didn't care. Mia… Mia was all that mattered. "Look what you made me do, Ethan. What the fuck?"

"I have to go," Ethan finally managed to spit out though it sounded more like hafta. "There's something… I have to go."

Dan and Matt just stared at him as if he was crazy or if they didn't believe what he was saying. Both of them had always been bachelors and their idea of a long-term relationship was with a woman who you hadn't picked up at the bar an hour earlier.

"Why ya have to go?" Dan asked, laughing as he stumbled off the stool. "Come on, man. It's not that big of a deal." He glanced over at a pretty blond waitress. "She can clean up the mess you made."

Ethan shook his head. He couldn't deal with this now. He had to get home. He had to come up with a plan. No… He didn't need a plan. He needed to get out of here and retrieve his wife. He didn't know what Mia had gotten messed up in, but he had to go to her. He'd bring her back home. Things could be how they had been before.
Ethan stumbled out of the bar, ignoring the confused shouts of his two friends. Outside thunder and lightning were booming as if the night sky was angry at the world for something that it had done. In just a few seconds, Ethan was drenched. He didn't care. He hurried over to his car and pulled at the door, forgetting to even unlock it so of course it didn't budge. Keys. He reached in his pocket, accidentally dropping the keys in a puddle on the ground. A master of unlocking he was not. He scooped up the keys and then shoved them into the lock.

Ethan didn't remember much of his ride home, just that he couldn't get there fast enough. At times, he would worry that the cops would pull him over for driving too fast. Ethan didn't care if he got a ticket, but it would mean that he would have to wait longer to find his wife. Even a minute seemed too long.

Luckily, he made it home without getting pulled over. He hurried out of his car, almost falling as he did and then hurried into the house. The house was a mess. When Mia had lived with him it had been spotless. She didn't seem like it all the time, but she was a neat freak who hated anything out of place. When she had left for her babysitting job, the house had slowly deteriorated and when he lost contact with her it started to look like a war zone.

Mia could scold or even yell at him for it, but he wouldn't care. He just wanted to see her again. Make sure that she was safe and bring her back home.

Not that she would have scolded or got mad at him. Mia hardly ever did. She was well… amazing… Dan would sometimes say that she seemed like the perfect wife and how he didn't know how someone like Ethan had ended up with her. Ethan used to wonder how he ended up with her too, but he also knew that she was far from perfect. His wife had secrets that she wouldn't even tell him.

Sometimes he saw a dark part of her that he didn't understand.

But everyone had secrets and dark parts of themselves. Ethan needed to find Mia. He hurried to his room and grabbed a suitcase which he crammed some clothes into. He didn't care what. He just needed something in case he had to stay in Dulvey for awhile. Who knew what Mia's situation was. She had just told him where she was and that he should come get her.

Ethan hurried up to his attic where he kept all of Mia's things and crammed some of her clothes into the suitcase as well. He hadn't wanted to put her stuff in the attic, but it seemed like he was giving up on her, but his mother and brother had pushed him to get rid of everything and this was the only thing he could do to get them to drop it.

Deep down Ethan was never one hundred percent sure that his wife was dead. He always figured he would just know if she was. He and Mia just had that kind of connection. And now he had proof she wasn't. Unless this was a joke too, but it didn't feel like it was.

No… she was out there and he was going to bring her home. He had endless questions about where she had been, but they would get it all sorted out.

Ethan sighed and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He was tempted to listen to the last video that she had sent him again. He had listened to it so many times that he had it memorized, but he still often couldn't help himself from watching again.

But now wasn't the time. He needed to get ready. He wanted to be on the road as soon as possible.

Every second he was apart from Mia was too long.


Author Note: Hey! I hope you all enjoyed this. I'm going to try to update this story every weekend, and I'm a fairly fast writer so I don't imagine that I will have any problem doing so. I hope you all enjoyed it. This is my first RE fanfic even though I've been writing original fiction for fun for a long time and I've been a Resident Evil fan for sixteen years.

Feel free to review! Thank you for reading!