It was night, the room heavy with silence. With shaking hands, Madison reached for her digital memo recorder. She pressed play, and the sound of her own snoring filled the room. Her eyes remained locked on the thin strip of light beneath the door as Faith's shadow hovered there for one breath, two, then disappeared.
Madison crept from the bed and pressed herself flat against the floor, cheek to the cold hardwood as she peered through the gap. From somewhere in the house, an indistinct gospel channel played, the words unintelligible but the cadence unmistakable. A preacher's rise and fall.
Faith's shoes—sensible tan loafers with a scuff on the left toe—drifted past Madison's limited field of vision. The sound of her footsteps receded down the hallway toward her bedroom.
Madison scrambled to her feet and dove toward her bed, reaching underneath to pull out the duffel bag she'd packed three days ago and had been too afraid to use. She dragged it to the window, already imagining the cool night air on her face, the crunch of gravel under her feet as she ran.
The window wouldn't budge.
She tried again, straining until the muscles in her forearms burned. Nothing. She activated the flashlight on her phone and examined the frame more closely. In the harsh white light, she saw it: dried glue, thick and yellowed, sealing the window shut along every edge. Not an accident. Not age, or weather, or time. Deliberate imprisonment.
She scratched a sore on her arm absently as she raced to the bathroom, hoping for another exit. The bathroom window—smaller, higher, but maybe just enough—was similarly sealed. The same thick lines of glue trapped her just as effectively as iron bars would have.
Back in her bedroom, Madison stood with the duffel bag clutched to her chest like a shield, staring at the door. Her throat constricted around a scream she couldn't release.
In the hallway, the gospel channel continued its muffled sermon. A pulsing glow emanated from Faith's partially open door at the corridor's end. Madison's door creaked as she eased it open, wincing at each small sound. She stepped into the hall, duffel clutched tight, and began moving toward the living room.
A whimper stopped her. Faith's voice, broken and small.
Madison continued toward the living room, one foot in front of the other. Freedom was just ahead. The front door. The night. Anywhere but here.
Faith's cry rose again, louder now. Raw with a pain Madison recognized too well.
Madison stopped walking. Her feet seemed to root themselves to the floor as she turned, almost against her will, to look back toward Faith's room. She hesitated only a moment before tossing her duffel bag back into her bedroom and moving toward the source of the crying.
Faith's bedroom flickered with the cold blue light of the television. On-screen, a preacher stood at a podium, his hands raised in emphatic gestures as a choir swayed behind him. But Faith wasn't watching the TV. She lay curled on her side, back to the door, facing a laptop screen that cast its own glow across her tear-streaked face.
Madison peered through the crack in the door, following Faith's gaze to the laptop.
There on the screen was Richard, shirtless and smiling, laughing with someone Madison couldn't see. His voice came through tinny but clear: "I love you." An unseen woman's hand—slender, with a ring Madison didn't recognize—reached up to touch his cheek with casual intimacy.
The laptop slammed shut with a crack that made Madison flinch. Faith's whimpers turned to shuddering sobs as she pulled the blankets up to her chin like armor. Madison watched as Faith struggled to compose herself, taking deep breaths that seemed to catch and splinter in her throat. After a long moment, Faith reopened the laptop, only to break down again at the sight of Richard's face.
Madison bit at her fingernail, a childhood habit resurfaced, as she watched Faith and the screen. Richard smiled, laughed, and puckered his lips for a kiss meant for someone else. Someone who wasn't Faith.
Madison stepped back into the hallway, as though pushed by an invisible hand. The television's irregular glow illuminated her face, the tears tracking silently down her cheeks matching Faith's exactly. Two women crying in separate rooms for entirely different reasons that somehow felt, in that moment, identical.
Chapter 17