I knocked once on the cabin door. Hard.
Vanessa opened it, and whatever expression she’d been wearing before dropped off her face the second she saw me standing there.
“Why are you here?” she said.
“Where is Ellie?”
Marcus appeared behind her so fast I knew he’d been standing right there, listening.
“She’s asleep,” Vanessa said, crossing her arms like a wall going up.
“We were out on the water all day,” Marcus added quickly. “She wore herself out swimming. Claire, you’re upsetting yourself for nothing.”
“Move,” I said.
“We’re literally about to sit down and eat,” Vanessa said, forcing a smile that didn’t reach anywhere near her eyes. “You’re making this into a whole thing.”
“I didn’t drive two hours to sit down for dinner.” I looked past Marcus toward the dark hallway behind him. “I’m not leaving this cabin until I see my daughter. Say that again if you need to hear it twice.”
Marcus put a hand up, the way you’d calm a spooked animal. “Just — sit for a minute, okay? Let’s not do this on the porch.”
I stepped past him into the cabin.
Every question I asked after that got answered a half-second too fast, like they’d rehearsed it.
“She’s fine.”
“She just needs rest.”
“You’re overreacting, Claire, you always do this.”
I sat at the edge of a kitchen chair I never intended to use, my eyes on the hallway the whole time. Vanessa set the table like we were about to have a pleasant family dinner. Marcus barely touched his fork. He kept wiping his palms flat against his jeans, over and over, a tell I recognized from a decade of marriage — he only did that when he was about to get caught in something.
Every time the floor creaked down that hallway, Vanessa’s voice jumped a notch louder and she’d suddenly need to talk about the weather, the drive home, anything except my daughter.
I stood up. “I want to see her room.”
“Claire—”
I was already moving.
My hand landed on the doorknob at the end of the hall at the exact second it turned from the other side.
“Mom?” Ellie’s voice, small and disbelieving, floated out of the dark room. “Is that really you?”
I will hear that voice in my sleep for the rest of my life.
She stepped into the hallway wearing an oversized gray hoodie, even though the entire cabin was warm enough to fog the windows. One hand was pressed flat against the side of her head, like she was trying to hold something in place.
Then the hood slipped back off her hair.
A whole section near the front had been hacked away, jagged and uneven, close to the scalp in places.
I looked down. Across the front of the hoodie, in thick black marker, someone had written one word.
LIAR.
