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Chapter 31

Briana

What do you mean it’s stuck?” I said.

Jacob was rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s stuck. I can’t get it open.”

I stared at him. Then I went back to the door and started tugging desperately on the handle. It was like trying to open a bank vault.

“No…” I breathed. “No, no, no, no, no…”

“Are you claustrophobic?” he asked, looking worried.

No. I was not. “Yes,” I lied.

“But we eat lunch in a supply closet—”

“That door isn’t locked!”

I pulled out my phone and called Alexis, pacing in front of the fireplace while Jacob threw open the windows and the bathroom door to help me with my fictional fear of enclosed spaces.

She answered on the second ring. “Hey—”

“Ali? We’re locked in Jacob’s room.”

“What?”

“There was some freaky breeze, the door slammed shut, and now it won’t open.”

I heard the sound of her coming in the front door while she relayed this to Daniel. “We just got home, we’ll be up there in a second.”

Forty-five minutes later, we were still trapped.

Jacob had been trying to troubleshoot from our side, but the issue wasn’t the lock. The door had swollen itself into the doorway. Like a broken finger swelling around a wedding ring.

“I’m just going to cut it,” Daniel said resignedly through the speaker on my phone.

“No, don’t cut it,” Jacob said quickly.

I gawked at him. “What do you mean don’t cut it?”

He nodded at it. “That’s an antique door. It’s probably original to the house. It’s irreplaceable.”

“We are trapped here!”

He peered at me calmly. “Look, my cabin does stuff like this. The foundation settles and the house shifts. Humidity makes the doors stick. It just rained yesterday, that’s probably what’s going on.”

Jacob raised his voice. “Daniel, do you have a dehumidifier?”

“In the basement, yeah.”

“Okay. Set that up in the hallway. Let’s run it overnight. See if we can’t dry out the wood a little. If we can’t get it open in the morning, we can reevaluate.”

“Good idea,” Daniel said from the other side.

I looked at Jacob bleakly. “All night? We have to stay here all night?”

“We were going to bed anyway,” Jacob said. “We have a bathroom, water, we just ate. We don’t need anything—”