Chapter 2: What Was Inside the Bag
Aunt Lisa pulled the tape from Sarah's mouth herself.
Sarah gasped.
Then she looked straight at Richard.
"He locked me in there the night I told him I was leaving and taking Ethan."
The room went completely still.
Richard didn't move.
He didn't deny it.
He just looked at the family with the same flat expression he'd worn all evening.
"She was confused," he said finally.
"She needed time to calm down."
"Three days?" Lisa said.
"You called it calming down?"
Ethan was still on his knees beside his mother, his arms around her, his face pressed into her shoulder.
Sarah reached up and held the back of his head.
"I kept knocking," she whispered.
"Every time I heard voices.
I didn't know if anyone could hear me."
"We heard you," Ethan said.
"I heard you."
Richard took one step toward them.
Lisa moved in front of him.
"Don't."
That was when Sarah's eyes dropped to the floor of the passage — to something still sitting in the corner behind her.
A small leather bag.
Packed.
Ethan looked at it.
Then at his mother.
"Mom…
what's in the bag?"
Sarah didn't answer immediately.
But the look on her face said the three days in that passage were not the beginning of this story.
They were closer to the end of something much longer.
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What Richard had been hiding went far deeper than one locked door.
Click the link below to read the full story — and find out what was inside that bag.
