No one opens the door for her. She unlocks it and disappears inside. I stand around for a few seconds, waiting for a wave or a smile that doesn’t come. Then I go home and fight the urge to watch from my window. Instead, I sit in the living room, watching Aaron and Jay play Xbox while Nia cheers her brother on.

“How was it?” Mum whispers.

I think of the fire station and the squirrel park and the kiss and say, “It was good.”

44

They’ve been there since the beginning, but I only noticed them today. Carvings inside my built-in wardrobe: words and pictures and lines.

The first I noticed were two stick figures, one large and one small. You can’t see them from the outside. I only realized when my shirt fell off a hanger and got wedged in the sliding rail, and, there, when I pulled it free, they were. Lying on my side, my head in the wardrobe and my phone shining in the darkness, I saw more stick figures, always two, always one big and one small, and hundreds of vertical lines scored through like tally marks.

IIII

The words are different in here. On the walls it said HELP ME, but, in here, it says NO HELP.

Whoever wrote this gave up.

I throw all my clothes on the bed and crouch in the closet space, then slide the door closed and sit in the phone’s light. There are eight sets of figures in total, all the same, and staring at them makes me feel uneasy. I take as many pictures as I can before I need to get out and suck in three deep breaths.

This was a bad place. I’m sure of it, now. No one would put this much effort into a game. The holes could be dismissed as a coincidence, and the writing on the wall could be someone’s idea of a sick joke—a ghost story to scare the next owners. But who would sit in a wardrobe, carving stick figures and making hundreds of slashes?

If I show this to Mum, she’ll freak out. She loves this house so much, and I don’t want to ruin it for her. Jay would still play it down, and Nia’s making the most of her last few hours with Aaron.

I message Zak, because I need to know if I’m being silly. When he arrives, I point at my wardrobe and say, “In there.”

He raises his eyebrows. “What’s going on?”

“Just get in. And take this.” I hand him my phone, but he doesn’t move.

“You want me to get in your closet?”

“Just do it. You’ll understand.”

Zak shakes his head but clambers in anyway. When I pull the door closed, I hear rustling inside, then, “Fucking hell.”

“Can you see it?”

“Of course I can. What is it?”