Chapter 2 - The Secret Wardrobe
“She’s at work,” Maya whispered, though the defiant certainty in her voice had fractured, leaving a jagged edge of pure terror. “She has to be. She signed out at the front gate.”
“People forget things, Maya,” Leo argued, his sneakers shuffling anxiously against the floorboards. “If she comes back—if she finds out we’re squatting here—they’ll send us all back. You know what they’ll do to us.”
Send us back.
The words echoed in my mind like a gunshot. Back where? An orphanage? A group home? A juvenile facility? My mind raced through a dozen frantic permutations. Maya wasn't just skipping school to hang out with rebellious teenagers. She was harboring runaways. Children from somewhere else, hiding out in the very bedroom I decorated with pastel pink walls and butterfly decals.
“She didn't see anything,” Maya insisted, though her voice shook. “She kissed me goodbye this morning. She was talking about her presentation at the office. She never comes back early.”
“Check the closet,” the younger girl, Chloe, whimpered. “Please, Maya. Check the closet.”
My muscles screamed for release. My right leg had gone completely numb, a hot pins-and-needles sensation creeping up from my ankle. If I shifted an inch, the wooden slat would creak. If I stayed still, I was about to watch my thirteen-year-old daughter open the door to a terrifying, hidden reality I had been too blind to notice.
Slowly, agonizingly, Maya’s school flats pivoted. The soft scritch-scratch of leather soles moved across the floor.
The louvered doors of the bedroom closet rattled. A hinge squeaked—a dry, high-pitched protest that sounded deafening in the quiet house.
“See?” Maya’s voice piped up, breathless and forcing a brittle note of reassurance. “Nothing. Just my winter coats and your extra duffel bags. Nobody’s here.”
“Okay,” Leo breathed, letting out a long, ragged sigh that sounded like he had been holding his breath for an hour. “Okay. Let’s just... let’s get some food and keep quiet. If the neighbor across the street—that Mrs. Gable lady—sees us through the windows again, we’re done for.”
Mrs. Gable. The woman who had tried to warn me yesterday, whom I had mentally dismissed as a lonely neighborhood busybody. A wave of suffocating guilt crashed over me. She had been right, and I had been too arrogant to listen.
May you like
“Don’t talk about Mrs. Gable,” Maya snapped. “Just stay away from the front windows. I’ll go down to the kitchen and grab whatever’s in the pantry. Don't touch anything else.”
I heard her light steps pad across the room, past the edge of the bed frame, and out into the hallway.
