Chapter 1
“Anyone who didn’t know my pregnant wife was locked in there can leave. Now.”
Maya trembled in my arms while I stared across the patio.
Behind her, inside the open shed, her smashed phone lay beside strips of duct tape, a kitchen knife, and a small digital recorder with a red light still blinking. My mother sat beneath the overturned cushion tower. Nathan was half-upright beside the broken irrigation frame, blood at the corner of his mouth.
Nobody spoke.
Then people began leaving.
My aunt Celeste went first. Two younger cousins followed her. Three guests who had been standing near the garden doors disappeared without looking back.
Seven relatives remained.
Seven.
I counted them twice.
My mother saw me doing it.
“Caleb, don’t be ridiculous.”
My jaw tightened.
Maya pressed her face against my chest. She was frighteningly light in my arms, and every breath came shallow enough that I could feel it through my jacket.
Evelyn looked at her and sighed.
“She hasn’t eaten properly for three days. Stop acting as though she survived a war.”
Three days.
I had been gone three days.
I was supposed to remain away for five.
The meaning landed immediately.
“You locked her in here the day I left.”
My mother gave me the same look she used when I was a boy and disappointed her at dinner.
“If she knew how to obey, she would never have stayed there.”
Maya’s fingers tightened against my lapel.
I looked at Nathan.
He looked away.
Then the recorder inside the shed spoke.
A woman’s voice crackled through its tiny speaker.
Evelyn.
“If Caleb comes back early, we move her before he sees the lock.”
Everyone on the patio froze.
The recorder had not stopped.
It was playing back whatever Maya had managed to capture.
Then Nathan’s voice followed.
“And if she loses the baby before then?”
My mother answered calmly.
“Then half our problem solves itself.”
Nobody moved.
Not even the seven relatives who had stayed.
I looked at them one by one.
Then at my mother.
“You were wrong.”
Evelyn frowned.
I adjusted Maya carefully in my arms.
“The shed was not your biggest mistake.”
May you like
I looked toward the blinking recorder.
“Leaving her alive long enough to hear you was.”
