Chapter 10
980 Words
By December 27th, Autumn had the whole house mapped out in her head. Every room. Every lock. Every window she'd managed to get close to. She could recreate the floor plan in her sleep at this point, and she practically had, lying awake at two in the morning running through it over and over like she was studying for a test.
But there was a gap. A very big one.
She knew the basement existed. She'd felt it, like literally felt it through the panel door in the hall. She’d heard that low hum like a fan was running on the other side. But she had no idea how to get down there, and she also had no idea what she'd find when she did.
Not knowing was the worst part. She could handle a lot of things, but she couldn't plan around something she couldn't see.
So that morning, when Gabriel came downstairs and told her he had a paper due before the new year and needed a few quiet hours in the study, Autumn smiled and said that was totally fine and she'd keep herself busy.
She meant it. Just not in the way he thought.
She spent the first hour on the sitting room couch with a book open in her lap, not reading a single word of it. She was listening, tracking the sounds of the house. The creak of the study chair. The muffled click of keys. The occasional shifting of weight. Gabriel in his natural habitat: focused and completely inside his own head.
She gave it a full hour before she moved.
She started with the doors she hadn't tried yet. There was a linen closet near the bathroom, but it was locked. A narrow door off the kitchen she'd always assumed was a pantry was also locked. The panel door in the hall was still solid, still locked, and still giving off that faint hum from the other side.
She didn't push on any of them. She just pressed her palm to the surface, tested the handle lightly, and moved on. She wasn't forcing anything today. She was just making sure she had the full picture.
Then she went to the kitchen.
She worked her way through the drawers the same way she did everything now—slowly and quietly, with one ear on the hallway.
The first drawer contained dish towels. The second had rubber bands, batteries, and a broken pen. The third was filled with knives, a flashlight, some extension cords, and a spare phone charging cable for a phone she didn't have.
She was about to close the third drawer when something caught her eye. It was small and silver, pushed to the back corner like it had been forgotten there.
A key.
It wasn't attached to anything. There was no label or keyring. It was just there by itself, and it didn't match any of the visible locks she'd seen in the house. The door handles were all the same brushed bronze. This key was thin and silver, and it looked more like a filing cabinet key than a house key.
She picked it up, turned it over in her hand, and memorized the shape, taking in the way the teeth looked, and the small ridge along the side.
Then she put it back exactly where she found it.
She was back on the couch with her book when Gabriel came down at noon. He moved into the kitchen and she heard the coffee maker go on, then his footsteps coming toward the living room doorway. She didn't look up right away. She let him come to her.
"How's the reading going?" he asked.
"Slow," she replied. "My head's not really in it today."
He tilted his head. "Anything wrong?"
She looked up then. She let her expression go a little soft and a little tired, just enough to be believable. "I was just thinking about what you said yesterday about the last chapter of the Bronte book,” she began. “I want to go back to it. I don't think I got it the first time."
Something in him settled. She watched it happen; his shoulders dropped a fraction, and the mild suspicion was wiped off his face.
"We can do that tonight," he said. "After dinner."
"Yeah." She smiled. "I'd like that."
He went back to his study with his coffee.
Autumn stared at the page in front of her, not seeing a single word of it.
The thing about Gabriel was that he needed to feel like he already had her. That was the real key to remaining alive. The moment she stopped acting like she was completely comfortable around him, the moment he caught even a flicker of something behind her eyes that wasn’t supposed to be there, her whole situation would change. She knew that.
So she made sure she acted just warm enough all the time. Every single hour of every day, she showed him exactly what he wanted to see.
And every single hour of every day it was costing her more than she could put into words. There was something exhausting about having to be two people at once.
One Autumn would be smiling across the dinner table while another Autumn would have to memorize the shape of a key and file it quietly in the back of her mind where he couldn't reach.
She didn't let herself think about how much longer she could keep it up.
What she thought about instead was the thin silver key that had been pushed to the back of a drawer, as if it had been tossed there without much thought.
She was almost sure she knew what it opened.
She just needed to find the lock that matched it, and she had to do it without Gabriel ever knowing she'd gone looking.
- Writer
