Chapter 11
864 Words
Jess Navarro had sent fourteen different messages in two weeks. Fourteen. She'd counted.
Four of them got replies, but they were short, flat, and weirdly formal ones that sounded nothing like Autumn. The Autumn that Jess knew used lowercase for everything and signed off texts with a random food emoji—a grape, a dumpling, or whatever she was in the mood for.
The Autumn in these messages used full sentences and punctuated like she was writing a professional email.
Something was wrong. Jess had known it for days because she’d been having a feeling.
Meanwhile, back in that house on December 28th, Autumn was thinking about Jess.
She was upstairs, sitting on the edge of the bed, turning her phone over in her hands. The screen was dark. She'd been staring at it for ten minutes like she could make it do something different just by looking hard enough.
She thought about the last real conversation they'd had. Two weeks ago, before everything. She'd been on the phone with Jess walking back from campus, and she'd been talking about Gabriel with this stupid giddy energy she hadn't had in years.
She'd talked about the way he paid attention to her, the dinners, and the fireside conversations. Jess had gone quiet for a second and then said, very carefully, "That sounds kind of intense, Autumn."
And Autumn had laughed it off. She'd said Jess worried too much. But right now, she would give literally anything to have that phone call back.
There'd been a moment a few days before she stopped being able to call out—before Gabriel had "fixed" her phone—when she'd typed out a message to Jess. She'd written: “something feels off. I don't know how to explain it but I don't think I can leave.”
She'd stared at it for a full minute, finger hovering over the send button, and then she'd deleted it. She didn’t want to sound dramatic or make it weird.
Now she pressed her palm against her forehead and breathed.
The phone in her hand was charged. That was the cruel part. Eighty-three percent battery and not a single bar of signal.
Gabriel had shown her, very gently, that something had gone wrong with the network settings. He'd offered to kindly take it to a shop. She'd said no thank you, some instinct telling her she did not want him to have it for any length of time, and now it just sat in her hands like a very expensive piece of nothing.
Jess was probably three miles away, maybe four. She'd stayed in the dorms over the break. Jess always stayed back during breaks because she said going home to her family for more than three days at a time made her want to fake her own death. She was probably in her room right now, eating something terrible, watching something good, waiting for Autumn to stop being weird and text her back.
She had no idea. None.
Autumn heard Gabriel's footsteps on the stairs. She looked up when he appeared in the doorway of the room, and his eyes went straight to the phone in her hands.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Yeah," she said. "Just checking the time."
He looked at the phone for one second longer than he needed to, then said, "The clock on the mantelpiece is easier.”
"Right." She put the phone down on the bed beside her. "Old habit."
He held her eyes for a moment. Then he nodded, said dinner would be ready in an hour, and left.
She waited until she heard him on the stairs. Then she picked the phone back up.
She couldn't call or even text. But there was one thing she could still use, and that was the camera.
She got up, moved to the window, and began to take pictures of the latch, making sure to catch the bolt on the outside and the way the frame sat in the wood. Then she moved into the hallway, quickly and quietly, and took pictures of the panel door, including the handle and the edge of the frame where the hinges were.
Autumn went back to the kitchen on some excuse she'd rehearsed in her head—getting a glass of water—and angled the phone down into the open third drawer and took a picture of the silver key sitting at the back.
She took thirteen photos in total, all of things that looked like nothing but probably meant everything.
She didn't know who she was building a case for. There was no one to send it to, and definitely no signal to send it through. Maybe she was doing it just to feel like she was doing something, like she still had some kind of control over what was happening to her.
Or maybe she just knew somewhere deep that evidence was the only thing that mattered when you couldn't run.
She locked the screen and placed the phone face down on the bed.
The glass on the surface showed her reflection looking back at her—pale, sharp-eyed, and very still.
She almost didn't recognize herself.
- Writer
