Page 13 of Dread

Ellie set Gate back in its place on the post and moved to the second stone -- the chunk of quartz with its pink vein running through the center like a living thread. “This one’s Rose. Because of the line. See how it catches the light? That means it’s heavy for how little it is. Doc said that’s because the crystal packs tight.”

Tyler reached for it. Ellie let him take it, her fingers opening just enough to release the stone into his palm, then closing again the moment he had it. Not possessive. Just careful, as she was with anything that mattered to her.

I leaned against the doorframe with my arms crossed over my chest. My shoulder dug into the wood, and I let it. The pressure was clean. Something to focus on besides the tightness in my throat that had been there since I woke up and found Ellie already dressed, already standing at the window with her two stones lined up on the sill, already asking if she could go outside before breakfast.

The morning had come in warm. Not the punishing heat of the highway -- a gentler warmth, carrying the smell of cut grass and whatever was blooming in the garden beds that lined the clubhouse walk. The cicadas hadn’t started yet. Too early. The yard was quiet except for the children’s voices and, somewhere beyond the trees, the low idle of a motorcycle that came and went like a pulse.

Dylan said something I missed. His mouth moved, words lost to the distance, and Ellie’s head tipped back. Just like that. No warning. Her whole body went into it -- shoulders dropping, chest lifting, her mouth open wide enough that I could see the gap where her front tooth used to be. The sound hit me square in the center of the ribcage. Full. Unfiltered. A laugh from somewhere deep that didn’t bother checking if the coast was clear before it arrived.

This was different. Ellie had laughed before. She’d laughed just the other day. But those moments had always felt borrowed, something bright squeezed into the spaces between caution and uncertainty.

This wasn’t borrowed.

She wasn’t checking my face to see if she’d gotten too loud. Wasn’t pulling herself back or making herself smaller. She was just a kid in the grass with other kids, happy without worrying what that happiness might cost us.

My jaw tightened. The muscles along the back of my neck locked, and I pressed my thumbnail into the pad of my index finger until the pain bloomed clean and white and gave me another sensation to focus on.

“She’s something else, that one.”

The voice came from my left. A woman stood there holding a foil-covered plate, a dish towel thrown over one shoulder. A loose braid hung over her other shoulder, threaded here and there with gray, and faded tattoos covered one forearm.

“Thank you,” I said. The words came out a beat too fast. Smooth. Polished. The practiced cadence of gratitude, rehearsed so many times it no longer required thought. “She’s -- she makes friends easily.”

The woman glanced toward the kids before looking back at me. Whatever she saw, she kept it to herself. She simply held out the plate.

“I’m Rae,” she said. “Two doors down, the blue one with the porch swing. That’s lasagna. Leftovers from last night. Nothing fancy, but it reheats well.”

The heft of it sank into my palms, the foil crinkling under my fingers. Lasagna. Someone’s kitchen. Someone’s evening meal, portioned and wrapped and carried twenty yards across compound gravel to a stranger’s doorstep because the stranger had a child who laughed in the yard.

“Thank you,” I said again. The same words, different shape this time. Heavier. Loaded with a weight I couldn’t name.

Rae nodded once, decisive, and turned back toward her porch. Her footsteps crunched on the gravel, unhurried, and I stood in the doorway with a warm plate in my hands and my arms crossed over nothing because I’d had to uncross them to take the plate, and now I didn’t know what to do with my elbows.

Across the yard, Ellie had picked up Rose, the quartz catching the light. She pressed it into Tyler’s palm, her small fingers guiding his around the edges, showing him how the pink vein changed color when you turned it. His face lit up. Dylan said something, and Ellie nodded, serious, just as she did when someone understood exactly what she was trying to explain.

My shoulders stayed tight. They’d been that way since I woke up. Since before that. Since the highway, maybe. Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped believing anyone gave something without eventually wanting something back. A plate of lasagna shouldn’t have felt dangerous, but accepting it still took more effort than it should have.

Ellie threw her head back and laughed again. The sound carried across the yard and through the open door.

I held on to the plate and watched her play, waiting for the familiar urge to gather our things and run.

It didn’t come.

I stood there. Plate warm. Shoulders tight. Watching my daughter press a stone into a gap-toothed boy’s hand like it was the most natural thing in the world, which for her, maybe it was.

For me, nothing about this was natural. Nothing about any of this.

* * *

The clubhouse kitchen hit like a wall -- heat and noise and the dense press of too many bodies working in too small a space, all of it arriving at once the moment I pushed through the screen door. Someone had propped the back door open with a brick, but the cross-breeze did nothing except push the hot air around in circles. Two burners roared on the industrial stove, flames licking the bottoms of pots large enough to bathe a child in. A sheet pan of breaded cutlets sat on the counter nearest the door, sending up curls of steam that smelled like garlic and oil. The exhaust fan above the stove ground at a pitch just below headache territory, a constant mechanical whine that everything else had to shout over.

I hadn’t meant to come here. That was the thing. I’d returned Rae’s plate -- washed it, dried it, carried it back to her porch with Ellie skipping ahead -- and then found myself walking toward the clubhouse instead of the townhome, drawn by the smell or the noise or the simple fact that every other adult in the compound seemed to be converging on the same point, and my body had followed before my brain could veto the decision.

Kitty saw me before I saw her. She was at the far counter, one hand on a cast-iron skillet, the other reaching for a spice jar on the shelf above her head. Her dark hair had come mostly loose from its twist, strands clinging to her temples in the steam. She didn’t wave. Didn’t call out. Just nodded once, sharp, and pointed to the cutting board that had materialized on the counter beside the sink as if it had been waiting for me specifically.

“There’s onions in the basket. Need them diced. Not chopped -- diced. Small.”

She handed me a knife. Not a paring knife. A chef’s knife, heavy in the handle, the blade worn thin at the edge from years of sharpening. I took it without thinking. My fingers closed around the handle just as they closed around anything handed to me -- carefully, testing the heft, calculating the grip before committing.