Charlie smiles. “Later. Let’s just have a nice morning first. Eat your breakfast and then we’ll get you dressed.”

  For a horrifying second, she looks down under the blanket thinking he might have taken her clothes off, but she’s still in the same clothes she wore to the bar last night.

  “I’m not hungry,” she says, knowing this man already drugged her once. “And I’m already dressed, so I think I’m ready to go home now.”

  “Jessie, sweetie, don’t be afraid of me. You have no reason to be scared.”

  She wants to believe him but he’s already knocked her out, drugged her and driven her God knows how far from home out to this dirty cabin.

  She looks to the window, wondering how far she could get on foot if she escaped, but he seems to read her mind. “No, no. There’s no use running. There are no neighbors around here and it’d take you hours to reach the main road. But if you just spend the morning with me, I’ll take you back home afterwards, I promise.”

  This makes her feel a little better. His smile is genuine, not creepy, and his voice is soft but assured. “Okay.”

  “Okay! Well, how about we get straight to pictures?” He claps his hands in excitement.

  “Pictures?” Her voice wobbles.

  “Yes! Now I know you probably want some privacy, so I’ve left your clothes in the bathroom over there so you can change alone.”

  She looks to where he points and sees a wooden door.

  “Well, go on!” he chimes.

  His expectant eyes follow her as she gets up from the bed slowly, a little shaky on her feet, and walks toward the door. There’s light coming from inside and she steps in hoping to see a window, but a bulb hangs from the ceiling with a chain string and bare wooden walls surround the doorway. No window.

  She closes the door behind her and uses the toilet before washing her hands and assessing herself in the mirror. The top of her head hurts from where he hit her last night but other than that she doesn’t seem to have any marks or bruises.

  This guy is crazy. She needs to just follow his orders and hope he makes good on his promise to bring her back home afterwards. She sees material folded on the shelf and picks it up. It’s a dress.

  Just do what he says and get this over with, Jessie.

  She takes off her clothes and puts on the dress. The fabric is thick and she’s already sweating by the time she gets the zip on the back done up. She looks in the mirror and tries to straighten her hair.

  She steps out of the bathroom and finds Charlie waiting for her, leaning against the doorway to the main room. He lets out a gushing sigh and thumps his fist against his chest. “Beautiful! It’s perfect. Give me a twirl!”

  Jessie spins uncomfortably in a slow circle.

  “Okay, we’re ready to do this!” He claps his hands and leaves the room for a moment before coming back in with a camera. It’s one of those ones that spits out the pictures itself.

  He directs her to sit down and shows her exactly how he wants her positioned, casually leaning back against the wall.

  “We’re just taking a picture and then you’re bringing me home, right?” she asks.

  “Yes. But, Jessie, this is really important. I need you to smile for me, okay? Because if you don’t give me a big, big, big smile, then I’m not going to be able to let you leave just yet. Do you understand?”

  She nods.

  “Okay, are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  He brings the camera up to his face, and she plasters on the biggest smile she can muster, mouth wide and eyes gleaming. The camera flashes brightly then makes a noise and a square of film slides out the front.

  “Oh, my heart! You’re so beautiful when you smile. I’m going to keep this forever.”

  “Thanks, Charlie. So, can I go home now?”

  He pulls the picture from the camera and holds it up in the air, squinting at it as it develops.

  “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,” he mumbles, reaching into his back pocket.

  He pulls out a black permanent marker and holds the photo up against the wall. He pulls the cap off with his teeth and writes her name on the white section under the photo.

  “I’ll keep it forever,” he repeats again.

  “Charlie, can I go home now, please?”

  Charlie puts the cap back on the marker and puts it back in his pocket. He looks at the photo again and then tucks that in his pocket, too.

  “Charlie, will you please take me home?”

  He looks down at her and takes a step closer. But the kindness in his eyes has gone. They’re cold. Emotionless.

  And it’s in this moment that Jessie knows she’s not going home.

  5

  RUBY

  The view from my perch at the top of the ladder is breathtaking. The early morning sunshine beaming over the housetops makes the unappealing task more enjoyable. And with the sun on my skin and my headphones in my ears, cleaning out the gutters is not as awful as I’d been expecting. Though it doesn’t do much to keep my mind from the worry of how Mory and Cameron are getting on at their new schools.

  Cam strutted out of the house this morning as though he had no worries in the world, but Mory had seemed on edge. I gave her the standard motherly pep-talk about trying to keep positive and to just be herself, and she nodded along as though this was in some way helpful. But I know that nothing I say can soothe the anxiety she’s feeling about starting at Burwell High today.

  Maybe I’ll take the kids out for ice cream after dinner to celebrate their first day at school. I want them to know I understand how big a change this is for them, and that I really do care. I’ll use it as a way to get an open conversation going about our feelings, maybe we’ll make it into a weekly thing. A family tradition. Or maybe this is all just wishful thinking and when I ask how they’re doing they’ll just tell me ‘fine’ with no further details, like usual.

  At least we still have movie night.

  We just watched our first movie together—Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, one of our favorites—in our newly decorated living room last night.

  After two weeks here, it’s nice to have at least one room that’s finished. I was right about the floor, it came up beautifully, and after a lick of paint on the walls and putting in some new curtains the space feels like a whole new room.

  One down, many more to go.

  My focus today is on getting these gutters cleared out before fall kicks in and they get even more clogged. I doubt they’ve been cleaned in years because with each scoop of my trowel I’m collecting huge amounts of decayed leaves and debris. The smell is unpleasant to say the least.

  I take a break for a moment and twist around to take in the view when I realize there’s a police officer staring up at me from the driveway. I wave a gloved hand and make my way down the ladder before placing my trowel and nearly full bucket on the ground.

  I take off my gloves, pull my earbuds out, and give him an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I was in my own little world! I didn’t see you standing here.”

  The officer smiles. “That’s no problem, I’ve only been here a minute.”

  I see his police car parked nearby and feel a spark of concern.

  “Is everything okay?” I ask, fearing something bad might have happened at one of the kids’ schools.

  “I’m just here about a noise complaint we got from a neighbor.”

  I put a hand on my hip. “A noise complaint? Are you sure you’ve got the right house?”

  “Yes, ma’am. The complaint concerns construction work being carried out on your home late last night.”

  I laugh and point at the door to the house. “Well, I did use a sanding machine on my front door yesterday, but it wasn’t late at night. I stopped around 7pm to watch a movie with my children.”

  “You weren’t using any loud power tools after that time?”

  “No. And the sander isn’t even that loud.”

  The officer nods in understanding. “Okay, well that all sounds reasonable to me. We have to follow up on complaints, you see, but a lot of them really amount to nothing.”

  “Sure, I get it, no problem,” I say. “Are you able to tell me who the complaint was from?”

  The officer shakes his head. “No, sorry.”

  He walks back to his car and as he drives off, I look around at the houses nearby. I haven’t had the chance to meet any of the neighbors yet but my guess is the complaint must have been from one of the houses either side of ours. There’s only a gap of ten feet or so between each property, so I guess they could hear me doing work outside but rather than come and tell me it was bothering them, they called the cops on me. Some people, I swear.

  I’m about to put my gloves on and head back up the ladder when I see three women approaching from down the street, hips and arms pumping dramatically. When they see me, they all wave in unison.

  I wave back and stay put while they power walk over to me.

  “Hi! You must be our new neighbor!” says the woman in the middle. “I’m Felicity Parker. And this is Kendra and Harriet.”

  Ah, so this is Leo Parker’s mom. Cameron has spent so much time playing with him, I’m surprised I haven’t seen her around until now.

  Felicity is tall, blonde and beautiful in the kind of way that only wealth can bring. No makeup, no surgical tweaks or fillers, just the delicate skin of a woman who has had the money to take good care of herself her whole life. Her two friends look a little like knock-off Barbie dolls standing next to her.

  I wipe the gutter grime from my hands onto my jeans. “I’m Ruby, I just moved in here with my two children a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Yes, my son Leo talks about Cameron all the time. It seems as though they’re the best of friends already!” Felicity’s eyes sparkle happily.

  “I know, it’s so sweet. I was worried it would take Cameron a while to find any friends around here, but he and Leo seem to be glued at the hip already,” I say.

  I’m aware that as I talk with Felicity about our sons, Kendra and Harriet are looking me up and down, seemingly weighing me up. The three women are so similar in appearance that I fear I’d have a hard time figuring out who was who if they were to quickly change places. They all look a couple of years older than me, maybe forty or so, are wearing athletic wear and have on baseball caps with their blonde ponytails hanging out the back. But where Kendra and Harriet are a little fuller in their figures, Felicity is lean and looks as though she could run laps on them. It’s clear she’s the pack leader.

  “Well, I’m just in the middle of cleaning out the gutters, and I don’t want to keep you girls from your morning walk.” I smile.

  “Oh, we don’t usually do this!” Kendra pipes up. Or maybe it’s Harriet, I’m really not sure. “Today is day one. We made a pact over the summer that we’d start doing a daily circuit when the kids go back to school.”

  “Oh, well that’s lovely. Best of luck with it,” I say, genuinely.

  “You should join us! I mean from tomorrow, that is,” Harriet says. Or possibly Kendra.

  “Oh, I really wish I could but I’m using the time the kids are at school to do up the house. I don’t think this place has been touched since the eighties.” I sigh.

  The three women laugh politely and say goodbye before continuing on with their walk, ponytails bouncing behind them. Every neighborhood has its own mom-clique, I guess I just met ours.

  As I turn back to grab the trowel and bucket, I spot a face staring out at me from the house next door. It’s that woman, the one who didn’t return my greeting on the day we arrived. I’ll bet she’s the one who called the cops on me. Has she been watching me the whole time I’ve been out here?

  If this woman has some kind of a problem with me, I wish she’d just come over and tell me, because if she’s going to be calling the cops on me every time I’m doing work on the house it’s going to get old pretty quickly.

  I plaster on a huge smile and wave enthusiastically at her, to show her I’m completely unfazed. Her lips turn downward in a scowl before she closes her curtains and disappears from view.

  6

  MORY

  I have never felt more invisible in my life than I have today.

  Starting a new high school is like going to a foreign country. The language is different, the culture is different, and while everyone walks around the place with purpose, you have no idea where the hell you’re going or what you’re supposed to be doing.

  It took me months to feel comfortable at my last school and it seemed like the second I began finding my place, we had to up and move again. My mom thinks it’s as easy as just ‘staying positive’ and ‘being myself’ and everything will be totally okay, but what does that even mean? Be myself. Well, I was myself today and that tactic got me exactly nowhere. I sat through my classes, I ate my lunch, and talked to no one. Nobody seemed to see me or notice that I was there. Not even my teachers. And it’s not as though it’s like that for every student: they already know each other. They’re already joking around with each other and whispering in class and hanging out in the halls together. If anyone else was feeling as alone and desperately out of place as I was, they were doing a great job of hiding it.

  I get off the school bus and make the short walk back to the house, dragging my feet as I walk. I want to go back to Arizona. I want to go back to staying up late and waking up whenever I feel like it. I want to joke around with Caitlyn, tease Dad with her, have barbeques by the pool and compete with Cameron to see who can make the biggest splashes jumping in the water. I want to eat dinner out on the deck in the evenings and talk with Dad and Caitlyn about the future, them taking an interest in the things I want out of life. It was like a dream, being there this summer.

  And now I’m in a nightmare. I’m stuck in a town that I don’t want to be in, in a school I don’t want to be in, I don’t know anybody around here, and I’m living in a house that’s so ugly inside that I wouldn’t invite a friend around even if I had one.

  Dad’s house is huge and he and Caitlyn made bedrooms just for us when they first moved in. Cameron’s has a bunk bed that looks like a castle and there’s a dragon painted on the wall. Mine is coral pink and has mermaid bedding and a beautiful white desk. They decorated the rooms back when Cameron was five and I was thirteen, so it’s not exactly what I’d choose now but it’s still much better than what I’ve got here. A bare white room with just a bed. I know it’s not fair to compare them because Mom is just an artist and doesn’t make much money, whereas Dad’s got a job at a big-shot company where he gets sent around the world to do business deals and sell products. So, I get that I can’t expect the same at Mom’s house as at Dad’s, but a lot of the time I find myself wishing they’d never divorced so that we could all just live at Dad’s house together and be happy again.

  At least Mom has finished doing up the living room, which actually looks kind of okay now. I mean, it’s not sleek and modern like my dad’s house but at least that gross carpet has gone. Mom showed me an old photograph she found underneath it of a girl with frizzy hair and huge glasses and the ugliest eighties dress you could imagine. She thought it was really sweet that someone had left it under the carpet all those years ago for future owners to find and she pointed out how beautiful the photo was. But when I looked into that girl’s eyes I didn’t see that. I saw pain. I’ve had to smile through a lot of stuff in the past few years, even when I didn’t feel like it. And the smile on that girl’s face didn’t look genuine to me, it looked forced. Like she was trying to make someone else happy.

  As I turn the corner onto our street, I see a guy approaching me. He’s got dark blond hair that hangs down over his eyes and as he passes by, he pushes it back from his forehead and smiles at me. I smile back and keep walking. I risk a look behind me and I see that he, too, is looking back to see me again. I snap my head around, embarrassed that he caught me checking him out. He’s majorly hot, and I really hope he lives on our street. That might make living here a little easier.

  I walk through the door and barely get the bag off my back before Mom is on me, telling me she missed me and asking how my first day at school went.

  “Yeah, fine,” I say, walking through to the kitchen and pulling a glass from the cupboard.

  “Fine? So, it all went well?”

  “Yeah, it was okay,” I say before gulping down an entire glass of water.

  “Did you talk to anyone? Make any friends?” she asks.

  “Yeah, I guess. There were a few girls there I was talking to. I ate with them at lunch.”

  My mom seems to melt with relief at this.

  “Oh, Mory, that’s great!” She hugs me from behind as I put the glass in the sink and I wait it out until she lets me go. “I knew it would go well for you today! You’ve got such a strong spirit. I’m not surprised those other girls were drawn to you. You’re fun, and approachable.”

  I almost laugh at this. If I could choose three words that least describe me, they’d probably be strong, fun, and approachable. Apparently, my mother sees somebody completely different when she looks at me. But I don’t want to hurt her and I can’t bear the thought of her crying over me again, so everyone will be happier if she just thinks things are going super for me. A thought now occurs to me. Is she doing the exact same thing as me? Just keeping her head down, not complaining or making a big deal out of things to make everyone else feel more comfortable? I stand there looking into her eyes for a moment, trying to see it. Is she as miserable as I am?

  She smiles and hugs me again. “Mory, my baby, I’m so glad your first day went well. All that matters to me is that you guys are happy.”

  And I believe her. She once told me that a mother is only ever as happy as her unhappiest child. And since Cameron runs around the place like a squirrel in a nut factory, I’m left with the responsibility of not ruining everything for her by being the unhappy one.

  So, I guess school went great, I’ve already made friends, I have no problem with moving to Lonerock or this gross old house, and I don’t want to just shrivel up and die.