Room 14's Secret novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Study Door

I called Zachary at ten past two, and he picked up before the first ring finished.

"Come," I said. "She was here."

He did not ask who.

"Thirty minutes," he said. "Don't go in the nursery again. Stand in the girls' doorway and stay there."

It took him twenty-five.

I heard the blue pickup in the drive, and then his boots on the porch, and I had the door open before he knocked.

He looked at me once, head to foot, checking for blood.

"You're not hurt," he said.

"No."

"Show me the window."

He went through the nursery with a flashlight, and I stood in the hall with both girls' doors open and my back against the wall.

He knelt at the sill and stayed there a minute.

"The latch has been unscrewed," he said. "Somebody backed the screws out halfway, and they've been loose a while. You locked it. It didn't matter."

"She lived here for three weeks."

"Then she had all the time she wanted."

He took a screwdriver from his truck and put the latch back with longer screws.

Then he checked every window in the house, upstairs and down.

I followed him with the shortbread in my hand, and I could not seem to put it down.

At the kitchen counter he took it from me and set it in the sink and ran the water over it until it came apart.

"There," he said.

I started to laugh, and for once it was a good sound.

"You were supposed to be good at not being noticed," I said.

"I was."

"You aren't."

"No." He leaned against the counter, tired and a little crooked. "Not around you."

Neither of us moved.

The monitor on the table whispered with the baby's breathing, and the refrigerator hummed.

"I wore what people put on me for nineteen days," I said. "I ate what they put on a tray. I slept when they said."

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