Chapter 1
Chapter OneAdele was tired. It was the kind of tired that sleep didn’t fix. She couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t felt it.She let herself into the house quietly and went up the stairs, stepping over the third one from the top because it creaked. In her room, she did what she did every night before anything else. She locked the door. Then she tried the handle three times to be sure.The room was tiny, with a mattress on the floor, one window, and no heat. She lay down in her coat and shoes and tried to sleep, but her mind wouldn’t let her. She stared at the window, then at the ceiling.She thought about her mother.Mary Winston had died three years ago, right after Adele turned fifteen. Adele was eighteen now, and she still spent a lot of time going over her mother’s last months.Before the Lipsons, it had been just the two of them. Her mother owned a small bakery in Springfield, and they lived in the little room behind the shop. Money was tight, but they got by. Then Gary Lipson started coming in. He bought bread most mornings and stayed to talk. He told her mother about his wife who had died and the two little boys she’d left behind. A couple of months later he asked her to marry him. He said they’d be a real family, that Adele would have a proper home and brothers to look out for her.They married a month after that and moved into the Lipson house. Adele was three. Steven was ten and Eric was seven.The first beating came four months later. Her mother had closed the shop late and dinner was behind. Gary hit her until she couldn’t stand up, and then he told her to close the bakery. When she refused, he looked over at Adele, and her mother gave in.After that it never stopped. Adele was still allowed to go to school, but only because her mother took the beatings for it. She knew that even as a child. The house was cold and frightening and there was never enough of anything, but she got through it because her mother was there.Near the end, her mother started watching her differently. Adele was fifteen, and she had noticed the way men looked at her, on the street, in the shops, and worse, at home. Gary’s sons had started to look at her in a way that made her mother go quiet and pale.One evening, not long before she died, her mother came into Adele’s room and shut the door behind her. She was holding a small key.“It was in the back of the kitchen drawer,” she said. “It’s for this door. Somebody put a lock on it years ago and nobody remembers.”She pressed it into Adele’s hand and closed her fingers around it.“Lock it every night. Every single night, Adele. Even if you’re only going to be in here five minutes. Never forget.”Adele had nodded. She hadn’t known then that her mother was saying goodbye. She only knew her mother’s hand was shaking.She never forgot.Two months later her mother was gone, and for three years there had been nobody between Adele and the rest of the house.She had grown up since then, and she hated it. Men looked at her now, and she knew what those looks meant. So she made herself hard to see. She wore oversized clothes she found in dumpsters. She bound her chest flat under them. She kept her shoulders rounded, her head down, and her hair under a cap. She took up as little space as she could.It only half worked. She could dirty her face and hide her body, but she couldn’t hide her eyes. They were large and dark and clear, and people noticed them, even when they weren’t supposed to. Under the grime she had a fine, gentle face, and she knew it. She would have given anything to look plain.The men outside scared her, but she could cross the street to get away from them. What scared her more was inside the house.Steven and Eric were drunks like their father. In the evenings she felt them watching her when she passed. They looked at her the way the men on the street did, and it was worse because they lived here, and they knew which door was hers.She pulled the thin blanket up and turned toward the wall.Downstairs a bottle clinked against a glass and someone laughed. The TV was on. She listened to the noises of the house the way she did every night: the fridge, a chair scraping, Steven’s voice, then Eric’s, both slurred.Then the voices stopped.She noticed the quiet before she understood it. A chair scraped again, and then she heard the stairs.One step, then another, slow and careful, like someone who thought he was being quiet. She lay still, staring at the wall an inch from her face. She heard the third stair from the top creak. He had stepped right on it. He was too drunk to remember.He reached the landing. The floor creaked toward her door and stopped.Adele held her breath.He was standing right outside. She could hear him breathing, heavy and uneven. She didn’t know if it was Steven or Eric, and it didn’t matter.The handle turned slowly. It went down as far as it could and stopped. The door pushed against the frame and didn’t open.He tried again, harder this time, and the door rattled in its frame. Then he just stood there.Her heart was pounding. She gripped the blanket. She thought of her mother in the doorway with the key in her hand, saying never forget.Finally she heard him mutter something. His feet shifted. Then he walked away, and the stairs creaked under him all the way down. The TV swallowed the sound.Adele lay in the dark and didn’t move for a long time.When her breathing slowed, she reached up and touched the key on the cord around her neck. It was warm from her skin. She held on to it.The house was quiet again, but it wasn’t over. It was only tonight. Tomorrow there would be another night, and then another.She wasn’t going to forget the lock.
