Chapter 3 The Girl at the Door

"Riley? Can you get the door?"

My mother's voice again, closer to the bottom of the stairs now, and it was that second call that finally kicked my body back into motion. I scrambled off my knees, scooping the shirt and the keys and the photographs back into the bag with hands that wouldn't stop shaking, shoving them in without looking, without thinking, just get it out of sight, get it gone.

One photograph slid across the carpet and disappeared under my bed. I didn't notice. I was already moving, bag clutched against my chest like it might try to open itself again, my legs carrying me down the stairs on autopilot while my brain stayed frozen somewhere back in that room.

Mum was already at the door, one hand on the latch, glancing back at me with a question on her face. I nodded, like everything was fine, like my heart wasn't slamming against my ribs hard enough to bruise.

She opened it.

Jane stood on the porch, exactly as composed as she'd been on the train, hands folded in front of her like this was the most ordinary thing in the world. She smiled at my mother, warm and easy, the kind of smile that made you forget to be suspicious.

"So sorry to bother you this late," Jane said. "I think we accidentally swapped backpacks on the train. Silly mistake, they're identical."

"Oh, that's no trouble at all," Mum said, already relaxing, already charmed, the way everyone seemed to be around Jane within seconds of meeting her. "Riley, is that the bag?"

I held it out. My arm felt like it belonged to someone else.

Jane took it gently, her fingers brushing mine for just a second too long, and I expected her to turn and go, expected the porch light to click off behind her and that to be the end of it.

Instead she looked at me and said, quietly, just for me, "Can we talk?"

"No," I said, too fast, too sharp. Mum glanced at me, confused, and I forced my voice softer. "I'm really tired. It's late."

Jane's expression didn't change. Not even slightly. She just leaned in close enough that her next words landed only in my ear, soft as a secret.

"Check your backpack first."

Then she turned and walked down the porch steps into the dark, unhurried, like she had all the time in the world and nowhere she needed to rush to.

"Well, that was sweet of her to bring it back," Mum said, closing the door. "Get some sleep, love."

I don't remember climbing the stairs. I remember standing in my room, my own bag on the bed where I'd left it, and unzipping it with fingers that fumbled twice before the zip gave way.

Everything looked normal at first. My notebook. My jacket. My gum.

Then I patted the front pocket where my phone should have been.

Empty.

I tore through the rest of it, shirts, chargers cables, the pharmacy bag I had save the future doses for my mum, gone, all of it gone, and in its place, folded neatly into a small square, a single piece of paper.

I unfolded it with hands that didn't feel like mine anymore.

I borrowed your phone.

Your fingerprints are all over my things, everything you touched.

Don't call the police.

Your mother's next dose depends on you listening carefully.

A phone number sat underneath, written in small, careful handwriting, the kind that looked like it had been practiced.

I read it four times before the words actually meant anything.

My hands were shaking so badly I nearly dropped the paper twice trying to find my house phone, the old landline in the hallway nobody ever used anymore except for this, except for right now, when the one phone that could reach Jane wasn't in some stranger's pocket.

I dialed the number.

It rang once.

"I wondered how long it would take," Jane said, and her voice was exactly as calm through the phone as it had been on my porch, like she'd been sitting somewhere just waiting for this exact call to come in.

"Where's my phone." My voice cracked in the middle of the sentence, and I hated that it did.

"Somewhere safe. For now."

"And my mum's medication? She needs that in a few hours, she needs it or she gets sick, really sick, do you understand that?"

"I understand it perfectly." Not a flicker of urgency in her voice, nothing that suggested she cared even slightly about what I'd just said. "Which is exactly why you're going to listen to me very carefully."

"Listen to what? You broke into my house. You left me a murder scene in my own bedroom."

"I didn't break in anywhere. And you have my things because we sat next to each other on a train, that's all this is, from the outside looking in." A pause, brief and deliberate. "From the outside looking in, Riley, your fingerprints are on that shirt. On those keys. On photographs of a man who isn't going to be walking around much longer, if he even still is."

My stomach dropped somewhere past my feet.

"You're lying."

"I'm not. Call the police if you want to test that theory. See how quickly they believe a seventeen year old girl who happened to be carrying evidence from a murder scene, evidence with her prints all over it, found in her own house, in her own bag."

"I didn't do anything."

"I know." For just a second, something almost soft moved through her voice, there and gone before I could hold onto it. "That's not really the point anymore though, is it."

"What do you want from me?"

"Come alone. No police. No boyfriend. No lies." She gave me an address, somewhere I half recognized, spoken slow enough that I couldn't pretend I hadn't heard every word. "Tomorrow. And Riley, if you make me repeat myself, your mother's next dose stays exactly where it is. In my pocket."

The line went dead before I could say another word.

I stood in the hallway holding a phone that wasn't even mine to hold, staring at the numbers on the little screen like they might rearrange themselves into something that made more sense.

Down the hall, my mother's bedroom door was shut, the light already off, three hours and forty minutes until her next dose came due, and somewhere out there in the dark, a girl with a purple backpack was holding every single piece of me that mattered.

"What have you done to me," I whispered, to no one, to the empty hallway, to the version of tonight I would have given anything to go back and undo.