Chapter 15 — One Year Later

The attic door stayed closed.This was a fact Nora registered every time she walked past the upstairs hallway — registered and moved on, the way you register a scar that has healed. Not absence, exactly. But no longer presence.Owen had asked, in the spring, what was actually up there. She had told him the truth in the form appropriate to a thirteen-year-old: there had been something wrong with the house, she'd fixed it, and the attic was still off-limits because they didn't need it and she preferred to leave it alone. He had accepted this with the pragmatism of a child who had spent four months at his grandmother's and was not inclined to push his luck.Lily had never asked. Lily knew.In September, Lily started at the new school and found, within two weeks, a small group of children who were quiet in the same specific way she was quiet — careful, attentive, choosing their words. She came home from school in September looking marginally lighter than she had been, which was the most anyone could ask.David had repainted the exterior of the house in October — the same grey-blue, just fresh. He'd climbed out on the bathroom roof to check the fascia and found the camera still zip-tied to its bracket. He brought it in and handed it to Nora without comment.She deleted the footage. All sixty-three hours of it, without watching. Especially not the last few seconds.She did not look at it again.