leave what I felt behind.
Alissa Hayes would not let me go.
She stood immobile on the front sidewalk, blocking my way, a silent specter whose pale face glowed under the front porch light. I stopped on the top step and stared down at her.
She held up both hands and pushed them out toward me, beseeching me to go back.
I shook my head. I was afraid.
Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. She looked frightened. “Please,” she begged me silently, placing the tips of her fingers over her heart then extending them to me in supplication. She stared up at a light that burned in the window of a second-story room, her face filled with sorrow. I followed her gaze and saw the silhouette of a young girl outlined in the window as she looked out into the night, watching Maggie leave.
Alissa looked at me, wordlessly pleading, and I knew what I had to do. If Alissa Hayes could not bear to enter the house where her family lived, I would do it for her. I owed her that much.
I made my way up the stairs, past the closed door of a bedroom where I heard Elena Hayes inside, weeping beneath the angry murmur of her husband scolding her for letting Maggie in. I moved past the open door of an empty bedroom and made my way down the hall to the room where Sarah Hayes slept.
She was still standing at the window, looking out into the darkness, unaware that her sister was staring back at her from the yard, consumed with an identical sorrow and longing.
The young girl’s utter sadness filled me, too, unbidden. I wanted to weep for her. She was yearning for something, but I could not tell what. Her older sister back? Freedom from this house? For the years to pass quickly, so she could escape it all?
The angry voices down the hall grew louder. Sarah turned away from the window, dully, as if she was about to embark on a distasteful routine she had endured many times before.
She shut her bedroom door and locked it against the sound. Then she locked it again. And again. She had three locks on the inside of her bedroom door. Even so, she placed a chair under the doorknob as well, jamming it so the door could not be opened. Then she sat on the edge of her bed, hands trapped between her knees, shivering, though the room was warm. She stared at the door, waiting and waiting.
For what, I thought, for what?
Below me, outside the window, Alissa Hayes wept beneath the branches of a tree, her figure a ghostly apparition of anguish, a soul caught between worlds in a quagmire of sorrow she could not escape.
Even her sobs were silent. I was her only hope. And I had no idea how to help her. Except to stay where I was, waiting with her sister, waiting to find out the truth.
And then I saw something that gave me hope. It rose in me like an ember flaring among the ashes: I saw Maggie beneath a streetlight, leaning against the hood of her car, staring up at the windows of the Hayes house, watching the shadows that danced behind the blinds, drinking in the muted sounds of Alan Hayes’s rage, taking in every scrap of information she could.
Yes, Maggie, I thought. Do not be like I was. Do not turn away. The answer lies within this family. And as I thought it, I knew it was true. The truth was here, in this unhappy house, and it would take both Maggie and me to see that Alissa Hayes got justice.
I played my part. I waited in the corner of a young girl’s bedroom fortress, keeping watch while she slept, unknowing of all but her dreams, not even twitching in sleep when, deep into the night, her doorknob rattled, paused, then turned slowly in the dark, and finding no way open, grew still again as footsteps faded down the hallway.
I stared at the face of Sarah Hayes in sleep, drinking in her beauty, the innocence of her repose, and I was filled with a fierce longing to protect her and to protect her innocence.
I waited through the night, knowing I was not alone, not while Maggie watched with me. Together, we would find a way.
Chapter 16
I am disconnected from earthly pleasures in my present state. I do not need to eat or sleep. So it was that I waited quietly in a