Days passed, and Anna spent them observing the room. She no longer drifted from the window to the bed without thought. Now, every movement was deliberate and calculated.
She always stood still in the center of the room, eyes scanning every corner, angle, and crack, from the gap between the door and the floor to the space beneath the bed, treating everything as a clue because nothing could be taken for granted anymore.
Anna had watched the hallway through the crack beneath the door for nights on end, memorizing the guards’ movements. They passed by every thirty minutes exactly. She counted it down to the second.
She also noticed how the lights in the hallway flickered once, just before the building seemed to settle into its nighttime rhythm. That flicker marked the beginning of the quiet
