The second freezer sat against the far wall of the garage like it had been waiting for me long before I ever understood what kind of family I had married into.
It was smaller than the chest freezer I had just torn open, older, dented, unplugged, and secured with a thick silver padlock that looked far too deliberate to be innocent.
My daughter’s words kept echoing inside my skull with a cold that reached deeper than the October air.
“That’s where the bad ones go,” she had whispered, with the terrifying calm children use when fear has been turned into routine.
I stood there staring at that lock while my pulse hammered so hard it blurred the edges of my vision.
I had already pulled Lily out of one freezer.
I had already felt her blue lips against my cheek and the violent shaking of her body in my arms.
A part of me wanted to rip the second one open immediately, consequences be damned, because every instinct I had left was screaming that nothing good had ever lived inside that box.
Another part of me knew that if I touched it wrong, if I contaminated something, if I panicked instead of thinking, I might lose the only chance I had to prove what had been happening in that house.
For one terrible second, I saw my whole marriage in a flash of sickening clarity.
Every time Taylor told me Lily was “too sensitive.”
Every time Evelyn laughed off some weird punishment as discipline.
Every time I pushed down my unease because fighting them always turned into a courtroom of smug faces where I became the unstable one.
The garage smelled like gasoline, cardboard, old dust, and the metallic bite of cold air spilling from the open freezer where Lily had just been trapped.
