Chapter 4: What Lily Saw After Midnight
The second officer stayed with me and Lily on the lawn while the first went inside with Brenda.
Lily hadn't spoken since the cruiser arrived.
She was sitting on the front step of my car now, her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped around them.
The too-small sneakers were still on her feet.
I'd tried to take them off to give her feet some relief but she'd shaken her head and pulled her legs in tighter.
"You don't have to talk to me right now," I told her.
"We can just sit."
She nodded.
Then, after a moment: "He had a camera."
I kept very still.
"Who did?"
"The man.
He came after we were all in our sleeping bags.
Mrs.
Cole turned the lights off first.
She said it was a game.
She said we were going to play a quiet game where we all had new names and we weren't allowed to talk." Lily's voice was completely level.
That was the part that frightened me most.
She wasn't crying.
She was reciting.
"She said the first one to say their real name lost."
"What happened when the man came in?"
"He had a light on his camera.
Not the big light.
A little red one." She looked at her hands.
"He walked down the row.
He said each name.
The new names.
He stopped at each sleeping bag."
"Did he touch anyone?"
Lily was quiet for a long moment.
"He stopped at Chloe's bag the longest."
The officer beside me had gone very still.
He had a notepad but he wasn't writing.
He was listening.
"Lily," I said carefully, "did Chloe say anything?"
"She said her real name." Lily looked up at me for the first time since we'd been sitting there.
"That's why Mrs.
Cole was so angry.
Chloe said her real name out loud and then Mrs.
Cole took her somewhere and she didn't come back to the sleeping bags."
I looked at the officer.
He was already reaching for his radio.
Inside the house, I could hear voices — Brenda's measured and smooth, the first officer's shorter, more clipped.
Then a pause.
Then the sound of a door being opened that hadn't been opened before.
"She's in the back room," Lily said.
"There's a room behind the laundry.
Mrs.
Cole locks it from the outside."
The officer with the radio was already moving toward the front door.
Brenda appeared in the doorway a second later, blocking it.
Her composure had cracked along one edge — not broken, just fractured.
Her smile was still there but it had gone rigid.
"There's nothing in that room," she said.
"It's storage."
"Ma'am, I need you to step aside."
"I have rights.
You can't just—"
"Ma'am."
She stepped aside.
Thirty seconds later, from somewhere deep in the back of the house, a child started crying.
Lily closed her eyes.
I put my arm around her and she let me, and I held her there on the front step of my car while the sound from inside the house got louder, and then there were more voices, and then there were more sirens coming from the end of the street.
Brenda was still standing in the doorway.
She wasn't blocking it anymore.
She was just standing there, her phone in her hand, screen down again, her face doing something I couldn't name.
May you like
She looked at me across the lawn.
"I want a lawyer," she said.
