Chapter 9
1046 Words
On December 26th, two days into being completely locked in, Autumn had a plan.
It wasn’t a full plan though. More like the beginning of one. But she'd been watching Gabriel long enough now to know that the beginning was enough to start with.
She needed to get into that hallway room. She didn't know exactly what was behind it. She had guesses, and the guesses were bad, but she needed to see it.
She needed to know what she was actually dealing with because right now she was building an escape plan with half the information missing, and she was sure that half the information was behind that door.
So she spent the morning being easy. She acted warm, relaxed, and curious about everything he said. She asked him about his research and then sat back and let him drone on and on, because getting Gabriel talking was the easiest thing in the world if you asked the right question, and forty minutes of him talking was forty minutes of her watching.
She noticed everything.
He was up at seven every day without an alarm. For the first hour he read, always in the study, and he didn't want company until after eight. She'd noticed that early on, the way he'd be slightly stiff if she came downstairs before the coffee was done, slightly warmer once it was.
She noted it now as a rule: study, first hour, alone.
He checked his laptop around nine. Then again after lunch. Both times he went quiet and focused, and he stayed in the study for twenty to thirty minutes. During those times he wasn't watching her.
He took long showers in the evenings. She'd timed it twice without meaning to. Fifteen minutes minimum, sometimes closer to twenty.
That was a long time.
In the afternoon he got a message on his phone and went to the study to reply. Autumn waited until she heard the chair creak, which meant he was sitting down at the desk, and then she moved into the sitting room and tested the window latch very quietly.
It moved.
She already knew that. But now she pushed the window itself, not just up but sideways too, running her fingers along the edge of the frame while she looked like she was just leaning against the wall.
Then she found the bolt. It was on the outside, like she'd thought, set into the frame so it couldn't be reached from in here. But the wood around the frame was old. She pressed her thumb against the corner of the sill and felt it give faintly.
The wood was old wood. Maybe it was dry or soft. She filed it in the part of her brain she’d reserved for such things.
"What are you doing?"
When she turned around, Gabriel was in the doorway.
"Looking at the snow," she said. "It came down heavily again last night."
He looked at the window. Then he looked at her. "It did," he replied.
He didn't come closer. He just stood there for a second with that easy expression on his face. Autumn could feel him reading her the way she'd been reading him, so she kept her shoulders loose and her face open, then made sure she was thinking about nothing except the snow outside the window.
"Come have tea," he said.
She followed him to the kitchen.
That night Gabriel tried to kiss her by the stove, and she let it happen. His hands came up to her face and she stood there and let him because stopping it would cost more than it was worth right now.
She was watching the drawer to the left of the sink while he kissed her. It was the third drawer down, and she knew that because she'd checked twice. That was where the knives were.
She wasn't going to use one tonight. She wasn't ready yet. But knowing where important things were was the only real power she had right now, and she was holding onto every piece of it.
She pulled back after a moment. "I'm exhausted," she said. "I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize," he said. Then he tucked her hair back gently and carefully. "Get some rest."
She went upstairs.
She waited for a full twenty minutes, lying on the bed in the dark, counting her breaths and listening to him move around downstairs.
Then she heard him on the stairs, heard his bedroom door open and close, then nothing. She waited another ten minutes after that before she got up and went to the hallway.
The panel door was in front of her again. She pressed her palms against it and pushed. It was still locked. It still felt solid. She moved her hand slowly around the edges, feeling for anything she might have missed the first time. But there was nothing.
She was about to step back when she felt something under her palm. It was faint, almost nothing, she knew exactly what it was: a low vibration in the door, like it was running on the other side. It was a fan, maybe, for climate control.
The kind of thing that was kept in a room that needed to stay at a certain temperature regardless of what was going on in the rest of the house. The kind of thing that was kept in a room that was meant to be lived in.
Autumn stood there with her hand pressed against that door and let herself understand fully what was on the other side of it. It wasn’t a storage room or a basement. It was an actual room, finished, ready, and waiting.
She had been right. She had been right about all of it. Her hands dropped to her sides as she stood in the dark hallway and took deep breaths.
Autumn knew she needed to move faster. Not recklessly, because she couldn’t afford to let Gabriel notice. But she had to be fast. She couldn't keep waiting for the perfect moment because the perfect moment wasn't coming. She needed to make her own moment.
She couldn’t help but think about the window, the old wood around the frame, and the bolt she couldn't reach.
She went back to bed.
She didn't sleep.
- Writer
