Chapter 27: Two Minutes

At two in the morning, Troy's phone lit up on the kitchen table.

It was a text from Giselle.

"East wall. Kitchen garden. Come now. Don't bring Molly."

Molly was at the police station with Celia's lawyer, giving a statement about the slap.

Troy read the text twice.

He did not trust a word of it.

He put on his jacket anyway.

The east wall of the Wainright house was lower than the gate, and the garden behind it was dark.

Celia was already waiting there in a black coat, with her hair pulled back.

"She texted me too," Celia said.

"It could be a trap."

"It could."

"You're coming anyway."

"She's my daughter," Celia said. "I would walk into a fire."

A service door in the wall swung open.

Giselle stood in it in a gray sweater, with no makeup and her keys in her fist.

She looked at Troy, and then at her sister, and her face did not change.

"The night nurse changes at ten past two," she said. "The cameras on the back stairs loop for three minutes. You have two."

"Why are you doing this?" Troy said.

"Don't talk. Walk."

"Giselle."

"You told me once I had a key and a car and a phone," she said. "I could do it myself. This is me doing it."

Troy stared at her.

Then he followed her inside.

The kitchen was dark, and the back stairs smelled of floor wax.

He had carried groceries up these stairs for twelve years.

The nursery door stood a few inches open.

A night-light cast a yellow circle on the carpet.

Hazel lay in an old white crib that had been Celia's, with her fist against her mouth and her paper crown still in the corner of the mattress.

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