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“Why were you so mean to her?”

I looked down at my daughter. Her cheeks were wet, and she’d been crying hard enough that her nose had turned pink. Behind us, people were still laughing and shopping, enjoying the last afternoon of Fall Fest. I wanted to get Sienna away from the crowds before she became any more upset.

“Come on, sweetheart. Let’s get home, and we can talk there.”

“I don’t want to talk about my costume anymore.” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “You made Goldie leave.”

I couldn’t find an answer that would satisfy either of us.

We walked to the truck without stopping at the candy stand she’d wanted to visit. Sienna climbed into the back seat and fastened her belt, then turned toward her window while I started the engine.

The drive home was miserable. Whenever I glanced in the rearview mirror, Sienna was looking outside. Once, I started to ask whether she wanted something to eat when we got home, but she shook her head before I finished.

By the time we reached the house, I was tired of the silence and even more tired of knowing I’d caused it.

Sienna grabbed her overnight duffel from the truck and hurried inside ahead of me. She dropped it in the foyer, ran upstairs, and slammed her bedroom door hard enough to rattle the framed photograph hanging beside the staircase.

I stood beneath it, listening to her cry, until I heard something slide across the hardwood floor.

Her duffel had tipped sideways, spilling a sweatshirt and the black sketchbook she’d been carrying around all weekend.

The book lay open near my boots. I bent to pick it up and stopped when I saw the drawing.

It showed a narrow corridor viewed from above, with a crooked doorway at one end and something enormous crouched beyond it. Sienna had drawn the walls in pencil, then gone over the important edges in black marker. Small arrows indicated where people would walk, and she’d shaded the space beyond the doorway so heavily that the creature almost disappeared.

In the margin, she’d written, Make them look at the little one first.

The little one was a squat, ugly creature positioned against the opposite wall. It had an oversized head and a mouth full of crooked teeth.

I studied the doorway again. She’d placed the larger creature so nobody coming down the corridor would see it until they turned toward the exit. Even the angle of the doorway helped conceal it.

In the bottom corner, she’d written February—eight months ago.

I looked at the facing page. Three versions of the larger creature’s head occupied the paper, each slightly different. In the final version, she’d widened the eyes and lowered the brow, giving the face a much more unsettling expression.

Along the bottom she’d written, This one looks scarier. She was right. I’d spent years teaching professional artists how a few changes to a face could alter the entire effect. Sienna had figured out some of those principles by drawing and experimenting on her own.

I crouched there longer than I meant to, studying the open pages.

The work wasn’t perfect. Her proportions needed practice, and the perspective in the corridor went wrong near the far wall. But she’d thought about what a person would see, where their attention would go, and how to make something ordinary become frightening.

She was doing the same kind of work I’d loved at her age. When I was a kid, I’d filled notebooks with creatures and elaborate sets. My teachers had encouraged me to keep drawing, even when some of the other adults wondered why I couldn’t make something pleasant for a change. I’d learned to sculpt with cheap clay, build little figures from scraps, and spend hours trying to make the things in my head look convincing.

Nobody had told me I should stop because monsters weren’t suitable subjects for a child.

I carefully lifted Sienna’s book from the floor, keeping it open to the pages I’d seen.

Upstairs, her crying had quieted, although I could still hear her moving around her room.

For years, I’d thought I was doing the responsible thing by keeping the darker parts of my old work away from her.

I remembered the afternoon she’d wandered into my workshop when she was barely two and discovered one of my unfinished creatures beneath a work lamp. The face had been grotesque even before I’d painted it, with exposed teeth and deep hollows where the eyes belonged.

She’d screamed when she saw it.

I’d scooped her up and carried her out, but she cried whenever we went near the workshop afterward. It took a long time before she stopped asking whether the monster was still there. I hadn’t forgotten how frightened she’d been.

Our marriage had been struggling long before Veronica left. I’d taken jobs that kept me away for weeks, sometimes longer, and I’d missed too many ordinary evenings at home. I’d convinced myself the money and the future I was building made those absences worthwhile.