Maybe some sleep would do her good after all. She checked the clock. It was after four. No one needed anything from her that afternoon. She’d take a nap, hopefully get rid of the last of the headache, then figure out dinner. Based on what she’d brought home, most likely cereal.

She climbed the stairs to her bedroom, her steps heavy. The hallways seemed longer than she remembered.

The padlock still hung from the window frame. Margot found her gaze drawn to it as soon as she entered the room. It was heavy. Thick. So out of place in a child’s bedroom. She’d throw it out, she decided. Either that or reuse it on some other door that she cared about locking. She didn’t want to have to look at it every night.

Right then, though, she was tired. She drew the curtains across the window, blocking both the padlock and the light, and sighed. The room wasn’t completely dark—not night dark—but she was fine with that. She wasn’t sure she wanted to return to the pitch-black of night anytime soon.

Margot tugged her shoes off, but left everything else in place as she crawled into bed. The blankets felt warmer than they had the night before. The pillows were softer. She closed her eyes and had very few conscious thoughts before her limbs went limp and her mind fell into itself, engulfed by sleep.

For a moment, all she was aware of was darkness. She was upright, walking forward, but nothing was visible.

Then a voice floated through the dark. “We did the best we could, but…”

Margot’s stomach coiled at the words. She knew where this led. She tried to turn away, to retreat back into a different dream, but already the scene was forming in the theater of her mind’s eye.

The long hallway. The threadbare runner, its color muted, somber. The funeral director. Slight and with gentle hands, an old but clean suit draped from his shoulders, his voice tinged with unspoken apologies.

“It’s just this way,” he said, and he turned toward her, and if the dream had let Margot cry out, she would have.

His face was no longer the soft, pale visage she remembered. The elements were still there—the eyes and nose and mouth—but they had been smeared, like an artist had taken a cloth to his still-damp painting in a frenzy. All that remained were hazy streaks of color, halfway blended together, striking across the canvas of his face.