Chapter 14
1049 Words
Something was different about Gabriel on December 28th. Autumn couldn't name it. She couldn't point to anything specific or say, here, this is where it changed. But she felt how obvious it was.
He was still warm, still moved, and talked the same way. He was still every bit the man he always appeared to be. But there was something else that she hadn't noticed before. It felt as though he was holding something in and the effort it took was beginning to show.
She didn't let on that she'd noticed. That was the most important thing. She kept moving through the day the same way she'd been moving through all the others. She was putting on a performance, and she knew it, but the only thing that mattered was that he didn't know it.
She made him laugh twice at breakfast. That wasn't hard. She'd figured out his sense of humor weeks ago—dry, a little dark, things that required you to be paying attention. She made an offhand comment about the snow and the way it buried everything, he smiled at her with his whole face, and she smiled back and kept eating her eggs.
"You slept well," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Better than usual, actually," she said. "It's quiet here."
He watched her for a moment. "Good. You needed it."
She asked about his work after that. She'd learned early on that asking about his research was the safest kind of conversation to have with him because it gave him something to talk about, it made her seem engaged and curious, and it kept the focus off her.
He talked for twenty minutes about a paper he was revising, which was about grief in nineteenth-century literature, and she listened, nodded, and asked the right questions.
In the afternoon she told him she wanted to read upstairs for a while. He didn't object. He never objected to that. She'd figured out that he liked her being somewhere he could track her, and the guest room was easy to track because it was just up the stairs and down the hall, with no exits, and one sealed window.
Autumn went upstairs and sat on the bed. She counted to two minutes before pulling her phone out from the gap between the mattress and the wall.
The backup photos were still there. She scrolled through them quickly—the hallway panel door, the drawer with the silver key, and the locked door off the kitchen. She added two more.
The drawer again, from a slightly different angle, so you could see the small brass handle and the way the wood had been worn smooth from years of use. And the panel door from further back, showing the stripping along the bottom edge, and how it was newer than the rest of the frame.
She checked the count. Thirty-one photos. Then she put the phone back.
When she came downstairs twenty minutes later, Gabriel was standing at the kitchen window. His back was to her and he hadn't heard her come down, and for a few seconds she just watched him.
His shoulders were tight. His hands were at his sides, not moving. He was looking out at the snow, the trees, and whatever was beyond them, and chills ran down her spine immediately.
He looked like a man doing math in his head. And it also seemed like he'd already decided on an answer.
Then he turned, and his expression changed so fast it almost made her dizzy. The tightness vanished. The warmth came up like a light switching on, and he smiled at her like she was the best thing he'd seen all day.
"Done already?" he asked.
"I got distracted," she said. She crossed the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. "Is there anything you want me to do with that chicken from yesterday?"
"I was going to make something tonight," he said. "Unless you had an idea."
"I could do a soup. If you want."
"I'd like that."
So she made soup and he sat at the kitchen counter while they talked about nothing important. Autumn made sure her hands were busy and her voice was easy, and the whole time she was having a completely different conversation in her mind, counting days and hours, thinking about what she knew and what she still needed to find out.
She knew he was getting impatient. She didn't know exactly what that meant, what he was planning, or what was in the basement that she still hadn't gotten to.
She didn't know that in two days he was going to leave the house for three hours and forget to lock a door. She didn't know any of that yet.
What she knew was the look on his face at the window. She kept coming back to it while she stirred the soup. That stillness. That quiet, calculated look. She'd seen that look on him once before, early on, when he'd said something about the winter light and she'd caught him watching her without knowing she was watching back. She hadn't understood it then.
But she understood it now.
They ate dinner at the table, across from each other, candles between them like it was any ordinary night. He poured wine and they talked about a book she was supposedly reading for the class that barely existed. When he said something kind about her analysis, she laughed at the right moment.
She cleared the table. He dried the dishes while she washed them, standing close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off him, but she didn’t let herself think about how that used to feel different. She just kept washing.
Later, when she was lying in the guest room with the lights off, surrounded by total silence, she let herself say it once in her head, very clearly.
‘He's running out of patience.’
She stared at the ceiling as the heating system ticked. Somewhere below her, the floor hummed faintly with that thing she still couldn’t explain yet.
Two more days...
Whatever was coming, she had two more days before she'd understand it.
She closed her eyes, knowing she was right about that. She just didn't know yet exactly how right she was.
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