Page 96 of The Quiet Tenant

“Okay,” she says. “No worries.”

She goes quiet. Looks around.

“Were you looking for something?”

You think. “Yes,” you tell her. “I needed…batteries, and I couldn’t find any, so I figured I’d check here. But it’s okay. It’s fine. Not urgent. No need to worry about it.”

She leans against the patio chair.

“I come down here, too, you know.”

Her voice is a whisper.

“Do you really?” you ask.

“Yeah. At night. I just—we keep some of my mom’s things down here.”

Don’t say anything. Let her talk. She needs someone to listen.

“It’s stupid,” she says. “But I miss her smell. Other things, too, but we have pictures and videos. Her smell, though, that’s harder to find. So sometimes I come down here and I take out one of her old sweaters and I just…sit with it for a bit.” She looks up at you. “Pretty dumb, huh?”

“I don’t think so,” you tell her. “You just miss her.”

What you don’t say: in the days after her dad took you, you couldn’t think about your mom without forgetting how to breathe. You had to stop thinking about your family altogether because it hurt too much, and you couldn’t afford to fall apart.

“My dad can’t know,” she says. “He wouldn’t understand. Or maybe he would, but it would hurt him. So I come down here at night, when he’s asleep.”

“At night?” you ask.

“Yeah,” she says, eyes on the ground. “I wait for him—for everyone to be asleep. Then, I go. I try to be quiet but I know he’s heard me a couple times. He asked about it once. I told him I was going to the bathroom.”

The words pour out of her, like this has been weighing on her conscience for a while.

“I have to steal the key,” she tells you, her voice so low you have to hold your breath to hear her. “Every time.” She shakes her head. “I don’t like doing it, but he leaves it in his coat pocket at night. He doesn’t know I know. He hates it when people touch his stuff.”

Before you can open your mouth, a question: “How did you getin?”

You reach for the easiest lie. “It was unlocked,” you say. “I guess he forgot.”

You hold your breath for a second. Maybe the lie is too big. Maybe she’ll call you out. But she rolls her eyes. “Wow. Seriously?” You nod, poker-faced. “Guess he’s been distracted,” she says. You’re about to sayyes, that’s true, her father is a busy man, he can’t possibly remember every little thing, but Cecilia speaks again. She has things to say, confessions to unload, more pressing issues than locks and whether her father remembers to use them.

“I have to replace the tape,” she tells you. “On the boxes. Every time. I throw out the old pieces at school so he doesn’t see them.”

You want to tell her it’s fine—the key, the tape, everything. You want to ask her more about keys and the places her father hides them. But she’s not done.

“I don’t want to hurt him,” she tells you.

“You mean your dad?”

“Yeah.”

You consider what she just said. She goes at night, when everyone is asleep—or so she thinks. When she believes no one can hear her.

The steps. In the hallway, at night. You thought it was him. Hurting her. It made sense for it to be him. You believed he broke everything he touched.

Did you think wrong? Has it been her all along, a girl visiting her mother’s ghost in the basement?

“You’re really close to him, aren’t you?” you ask. “I mean, you two seem to have a strong kind of bond. If that makes sense.”

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