Chapter 12
813 Words
Dinner that night was pasta. Gabriel had made it from scratch, which he seemed to do with everything, and it smelled good the way everything in his house always smelled good. Autumn sat across from him, ate it, and complimented it, hating herself a little for how easy the performance was getting.
They were halfway through when he put his fork down and looked at her. "Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Sure," she replied.
"What do you want your life to look like?" He said it in that easy, open way he always spoke, like he was genuinely curious. Like the answer mattered to him. "Not in five years. Not career stuff. Right now. If you could have anything, what would you actually want?"
She knew this question. Or not this exact question, but what it actually was. He'd been asking versions of it since the first week of the class, back when she'd thought it meant he was interested in her as a person.
The first time, she'd answered honestly and felt amazing afterward, like finally someone was actually listening.
Now she saw it clearly. He was taking inventory. Building a list of everything she needed, everything she was drawn to, every gap in her life he could fill just enough to keep her exactly where she was. It wasn't curiosity. He was just collecting information.
She answered carefully.
"Honestly?" She swirled the pasta on her fork. "I just want to finish my thesis without having a breakdown about it. And then I want to go somewhere warm. Like, actually warm. I've been in upstate New York in December for four years and I think I've hit my limit." She laughed a little. "And I want to see my grandmother. She's been on me about visiting, and I keep putting it off."
She told him normal things. Safe things. The kind of things a normal twenty-two-year-old would say.
"Your grandmother raised you, didn't she?" he asked.
"Yeah. From about twelve."
"What's she like?"
"Loud," Autumn replied. "In the best way. She has opinions about everything. She'll text me at seven in the morning to tell me what she thinks about something she saw on the news." She smiled, and this part was real because she let it be. "I miss her."
Gabriel nodded. He was listening like he always did, with his whole face, as if she was the only thing in the room worth looking at. She watched his eyes as he listened, noticing a small change in them like a slight softening as he took in what she told him.
She was a problem he was solving. She'd known it for days, but seeing it this clearly still made chills run down her spine.
"She's lucky to have someone who thinks about her like that," he said.
Autumn nodded and took another bite of pasta, deciding not to say anything else about her grandmother because she was not giving him any more.
After dinner, they moved to the living room. He pulled the novel off the shelf—the one they were supposedly working through for the class that had never been a real class—and settled into the armchair across from her, and started reading aloud.
His voice sounded perfect for a moment like this. It sounded low and calm, with no theatrics. She'd thought so from the very first session, back when she'd sat in that book-lined office and thought she was the luckiest student at Hartwell.
She sat on the couch with her feet tucked under her and let the words wash over her without really hearing them.
What she was actually thinking about was the key at the back corner of the third kitchen drawer. She was turning it over in her mind the same way she'd turned it over in her hand that afternoon, running her thumb along the ridge.
It wasn't a house key. It was something smaller. A filing cabinet, or a lockbox maybe. Or a door that didn't look like a regular door. Or even a panel door in a hallway.
She kept her face calm and her body still. Gabriel's voice moved through the room as the fire crackled. Outside the snow was falling again, but none of it mattered except the key and what it opened and when she was going to be able to find out.
She went to bed with one thought on a loop.
Gabriel was going to make a mistake. Everyone made one. She just had to still be alive when it happened.
Autumn didn't know how close the mistake already was yet. She didn't know about everything waiting for her below the ground floor, but it was patient, terrible, and full of everything she needed to destroy him.
But something was already under her feet.
She just hadn't found the door yet.
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