I got it into the lock and turned the deadbolt, and I opened the door.

My hands, I noticed, were steady, though everything in me had begun to roar.

That is the training, I suppose; eighteen years of teaching your body to stay quiet while your mind sprints.

But underneath the steadiness a terrible understanding was already assembling itself, because a locked door does not lock itself, and a spare key hidden above a frame is not knowledge a nine-year-old carries, and a child does not choose, on the happiest day she has looked forward to for weeks, to sit alone in the dark beside a washing machine.

Someone had put her there.