Chapter 1 - The Window Across the Water
The little girl appeared in the window just as the transformer blew.
Blue light flashed across the flooded street, and Lily Monroe saw her clearly for half a second: bare feet, soaked hair, both hands wrapped around a faded gray rabbit.
Lily stopped breathing.
"Ethan."
Her husband was dragging bottled water away from the rising seep under the back door.
"What?"
"There is a child in that house."
He looked up.
Across Willow Street, floodwater shoved trash cans and broken branches against an abandoned two-story house. The place had been empty since before Lily and Ethan moved into town. Its porch leaned. Half the windows were boarded.
But one upstairs window was open.
A small face stared back.
Then Ethan saw the rabbit.
The bottle slipped from his hand.
"No," he whispered.
Lily turned. "You know her?"
His face had gone gray.
"I know the house."
Thunder shook the walls.
The girl lifted the rabbit toward the glass.
Lily ran to the hall closet and tore open their evacuation bag. At the bottom, beneath flashlights and documents, lay the stuffed rabbit she had owned since childhood.
Same gray cloth.
Same one floppy ear.
Same red thread stitched across the left paw.
She carried it back to the window.
Ethan stared at both rabbits.
"Where did you get yours?" he asked.
"My mother gave it to me when I was six. Why?"
He didn't answer.
Instead, he stepped closer to the glass and looked at the abandoned house as if it had just risen out of a grave.
"Ethan."
His mouth moved once before sound came out.
"I lived there."
Lily stared at him.
They had been married seven years.
He had never told her.
"That was my childhood home," he said. "And the last time I saw that rabbit... my sister Claire was holding it."
Another flash of lightning lit the upstairs window.
The little girl was gone.
Then three hard knocks came from inside the abandoned house.
Not from the door.
From somewhere behind the wall.
Ethan grabbed Lily's wrist.
"We have to get her out."
Lily pulled free.
"First tell me what happened to your sister."
He looked at the water climbing the curb.
"Everyone says she drowned in the flood twenty-two years ago."
"And what do you say?"
May you like
Ethan's eyes stayed on the house.
"I say I lied to the police."
