Maeve tries to remember. She stopped by her own room in the early hours, briefly, after leaving Sim’s, just to wash and change into her dance clothes. She’d been both tired and buzzing to get to the studio. It’s possible that she flew out of the room without noticing that the door failed to latch.

Is it?

“Stupid of me,” Maeve says.

Anna turns and walks backward down the hall, toward the stairwell on the other side of the building.

“Meh, who cares?” she calls. “There’s no one here but us.”

In the room, Maeve collapses onto her bed. She’s long past the moment for easy sleep and crossed over into hyper-exhaustion. Awake too long, her heart pounding. She kicks off her boots without sitting up. On her room phone, the voice-mail light is blinking, and she rolls over, hits Speaker, and taps the button to hear the message. She’s expecting her mother’s voice.

What she’s hoping for is an apology or a reluctant admission that Maeve was right after all; they would head back to Maeve’s house in the city, and her mother would take the kids to school.

Instead, there’s only Talia’s small voice on the line.

“Mommy? I miss you. I want you to sing me my nighttime songs—”

Maeve can hear the fight in her voice, how hard she’s working not to cry. There’s another moment or two, and then her mother in the background, and the message cuts off.

The time stamp marks the call as three hours ago. Maeve squeezes her eyes shut, picturing Talia alone in a strange bedroom in that strange house, those woods.

You’re just too tired for this. You’ll call her in the morning. But her body hurts and she can’t sleep and she wishes she could call back right now. Her heart feels like a violin string pulling tighter and tighter until it might snap.

You’re just tired, that’s all.

Too tired to sleep.

She finally jumps up and grabs her robe. This time she pulls the room door shut as tightly as she can and double-checks the lock before padding down the hall in her sock feet. A hot soak will be just the thing; she needs to relax, to bring everything down a notch.

In the stairwell, her feet ring a soft echo against the metal steps. It’s dark and quiet downstairs. Inside the spa, she turns on one light, then two, the switch making a satisfying thunk under her hand. She undresses and sinks into the warmest of the baths, neck-deep, her breathing slow and even.