She nods, deciding to heed her own internal advice. “I love you. Call me the minute her fever goes up. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night. I want to be the first person you talk to after the doctor, and I’m coming home if it gets any worse.”
Sophie can almost see Talia at the kitchen table, dressed in sweatpants and a Buffs T-shirt and those adorable black-rimmed glasses, glaring into a blue-lit laptop, Tylenol bottle at her elbow. Sophie lets herself lean into this image, lets herself feel the safeness of it, especially as the image of Quinn’s bloody sweatshirt crashes through her thoughts. She feels slightly uncomfortable as they hang up, like she’s forgotten something, but she tells herself it’s the same feeling she always has when she’s forced to rely on someone else, and so she tries to ignore it.
On her phone, she turns on some music to drown out any sounds that might make the anxiety worse. Her feet are suddenly freezing, she realizes, and she walks to the closet, peeling open the doors. She sees the pair of purple slippers sitting there on the shelf and shoves her feet into them. Maybe her dad bought them for her? But he couldn’t have because he didn’t know she was coming. If they’re not for her, then whose are they?
She’s about to close the closet door when she lets her gaze fall on Quinn’s journal. Half-hidden beneath a crimson cable-knit sweater, just where she left it. She doesn’t want to think about the journal right now, and she goes to pull the chain to turn off the light.
But something catches her eye.
A flash of pink between the sweater and the journal. She doesn’t remember seeing that before.
She squats down, carefully peeling the sweater away with two fingers, like a layer of old, dead skin. Then she sees the sticky note. Neon pink and stuck to the cover of the journal, right in the center. Two words written in jet black marker across it.
Read me.
She spins around, as if an explanation will reveal itself somewhere else in the room. A stack of Post-its on her dresser, perhaps. Or maybe she stuck one on the journal yesterday and didn’t remember? But the thought is ridiculous. Of course she didn’t.
She is certain that when she last saw the journal, it did not have a bright pink sticky note on the front of it. She searched the thing from front to back. The pages were empty—empty except for Quinn’s name scribbled inside the cover. But this note. This note was not here.
She reaches out to open the journal without lifting it from the floor. She turns the first page, and then when she sees nothing else written in it, flips through the rest. It’s still blank. She isn’t sure what she expected to see. She sits back on her heels, thinking.
“Dad?” A minute later, she’s out in the living room again, trying to suppress the insect of fear creeping through her veins. She leans on the back of the sofa.
“I thought you were going to bed,” he says over his shoulder without pulling his eyes from the TV. Two soaking wet participants high-five on the screen.
“Dad.” She is schoolteacher stern now, and it gets his attention this time.
He fumbles for the remote and pushes the recliner upright with his feet. “What’s wrong?” he says, searching her face. She takes a deep breath, but the weird feeling is still there.
“Has anyone been in the house?”
He looks at her in confusion. There’s a cookie crumb stuck in his mustache. “What do you mean? Besides you and me?”
She nods.
He looks away for a flash, his own thoughts occupying him. Sophie doesn’t know what to make of this hesitation, and her mind tries to interpret it.
“Dad?”
“No,” he says quickly. “No, just us.”
“So, no one has been in my room?”
He looks furtively down the hall, then shakes his head.
“You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
Something occurs to Sophie. “At night, and when you go out, you lock up, yes?”
“Yes,” he says with a note of incredulity.
“What about the back door?”
He looks toward the kitchen, where the door in question stares back at them. Sophie senses he’s about to say that he locks that too, all the time, but they can both see clearly from here that the deadbolt is turned to the right. Unlocked.
She looks back at him, and he glances up at the ceiling, letting out a chuckle of self-admonishment. “The lock is finicky. I’ve been meaning to get it fixed for a few months.”
