She remembered drawing that butterfly design endless times at school after she moved in with her grandmother. The design in the wings had been different each time, but the butterfly always had two eyes and a broad, curling smile.

The wardrobe had been cleared out completely…except for the drawing, fallen from a pocket or discarded there after a play session.

Margot lifted her head and examined the room with fresh eyes.

Her parents might have cleared it out thoroughly after she left, but they’d missed the paper hidden under the mothballs. Even Margot herself had forgotten the space. But it hadn’t entirely forgotten her.

This was her room.

9

The sun had almost set when Margot left her old room. She felt heavier, like time had found ways to creep into the creases and linings in her jacket and now pulled her inexorably toward the floor.

If she turned left, she would retrace her steps toward where she knew the staircase had to be. But that would also mean passing by the master bedroom. Margot pressed her lips together and turned right instead. The hallway continued on for another twenty feet before turning. Margot had no sense of where she was in the house’s layout or even what might lie in that direction, but when she turned the corner, she was rewarded by the sight of a second staircase leading to the ground floor.

She followed it down. The atmosphere grew lighter with each step, and as she ducked her head to see under the ceiling, she discovered why. Ahead was a straight hallway leading to a large outside door. Light flowed through an archway to the right. And propped against the wall were her two travel cases. She’d followed an elongated loop and found her way back to where she’d started.

Margot retreated to the kitchen, where she feasted on something that probably shouldn’t have been called dinner: two granola bars and a cold breakfast burger that she’d bought from a takeaway joint next to her motel that morning. The eggs in the breakfast burger had taken on a strange consistency and bacon grease oozed from the bun with each bite, but Margot hadn’t eaten for most of the day, and it tasted delicious.

She’d bought the extra food under the suspicion—accurate, as it turned out—that there might not be much opportunity to go shopping. Already, the sky was black, and the kitchen was lit by a dim bulb above her.

As she folded up the empty burger wrapper and reached for the granola bars, her mind slipped back to the mirror in the master bedroom.