Her bedroom had been two doors along. Leanne stepped over the rotted fabric, feeling stiff threads crumble from the first disturbance in decades. She reached her door and let her fingertips graze the surface. It was discoloured around the edge, caused by sweat from dozens of little hands pulling the wood open and shut multiple times a day. The doors did not have handles or locks. She pushed on the wood and let it fall open.

Eight beds had been fit into the small area inside. Children’s sized. The mattresses, quilts, and pillows were all decayed, rotting through the frame. Too much moisture had come through the open windows, Leanne supposed.

She recognised her own bed. She’d been lucky enough to have one under the window. On nights she couldn’t sleep, she’d risen onto her knees and watched the mist drift through the trees below.

A toy rested beside the pillow: a small brown hand-stitched bear. Leanne didn’t recognise it. Once she had left, another girl had come to take her place, just as always happened in Bellamy.

“Leanne.”

She’d been staring though the window, lost in thought, waiting for her mind to quiet enough to let her sleep. At Henry’s voice, she lowered herself back to her knees and turned to face him.

He lay in the bed to her left, his hands folded under the pillow for warmth, his brown hair messy. His eyes glittered in the wash of moonlight.

“What?” she whispered back. They weren’t supposed to talk after bedtime. She glanced towards the doorway, half expecting to hear the thuds of Patience’s cane.

“I can’t sleep,” Henry said.

She didn’t know what he expected her to do about that when she couldn’t sleep, either. “Try to count sheep.” It hadn’t worked for her, but it might for him. Around them, the other six children breathed slowly and deeply, absorbed in their dreams.

Henry shuffled closer to the bed’s edge and lowered his voice even further. “Mike told me something earlier.”

“What?”

“He said Patience sometimes wakes children in the middle of the night. He said if they go with her, they don’t come back. He said it happened to Margo last night.”

Margo slept in one of the other bedrooms. Leanne squinted through the shadows, trying to read Henry’s expression. She was sure he was trying to scare her.

But, suddenly, she realised she didn’t remember whether Margo had been at breakfast that morning. And she hadn’t been in the kitchens, preparing lunch, or in the yard as they played in the evening.

Gooseflesh rose over her arms. Leanne licked her lips, trying to find something to say. Henry wasn’t teasing her, she realised. He was looking for comfort. He was afraid.

“We’ll be all right,” she whispered. “We can look after each other, okay? I won’t leave you.”