I Know You're Awake

Under her bed, behind a loose floorboard her father didn't know about, Nell kept a shoebox.

Inside: a photograph of her mother laughing in the kitchen, flour on her nose. A movie ticket stub from the last thing they'd watched together, some cartoon about a fish. And a folded piece of paper with her mother's handwriting on it, a grocery list Nell had rescued from the recycling the week after the funeral because it was the last thing her mother had ever written.

She took out the photograph every night and propped it against her lamp.

"I saw it," she whispered to it. "The necklace. She's wearing it."

The photograph didn't answer, but Nell talked to it anyway, the way she used to talk to her mother when she couldn't sleep.

"I didn't tell," she said, quieter now, glancing at the door. "I promise I didn't tell anyone. Not even Daddy."

Downstairs, she could hear Corinne's laugh through the floorboards, bright and easy, the kind of laugh she never used around Nell. Her father's voice answered, warm.

It made something twist in Nell's stomach, hearing them happy while she sat here with a stolen grocery list and a stub from a movie no one would ever finish watching with her.

She thought about the night of the accident sometimes, in pieces, the way you remember a dream — a seatbelt that wouldn't click right, her mother's voice sharp and scared in a way it never usually was, someone else's voice answering back from somewhere close. Too close for a car that was supposed to have only one person in it.

She always stopped there. The rest of the memory felt like a door that wasn't safe to open, not by herself, not at seven years old with no one who'd believe her anyway.

Footsteps creaked on the stairs.

Nell shoved the photograph under her pillow and lay flat, eyes shut, heart hammering.

The door didn't open. But outside it, a voice — Corinne's, so soft it barely counted as sound — said four words through the wood.

I know you're awake.