Chapter 2 - The Storage Room
We found Sophie holding her younger sisters tightly behind a towering stack of industrial laundry baskets in the damp basement annex.
Lucy, four years old, was crying silently into the hem of Sophie’s faded dress. Six-year-old Camille had already packed all three of their meager belongings—two changes of clothes, a broken plastic doll, and a worn-out picture book—into a plastic grocery bag because she had learned over the years that when Theresa shouted upstairs, it meant we were being thrown out into the cold.
"Mommy?" Sophie whispered, her big dark eyes wide with terror as she looked past me at the tall, unfamiliar man standing in the doorway of our cramped room. "Are we leaving?"
"Yes, baby," I whispered back, my voice breaking as I fell to my knees and pulled all three of them into my arms. "We’re leaving. Right now."
Richard didn't say a word. He stepped into the tiny, windowless room, looked at the concrete floor, the single overhead fluorescent bulb buzzing in its cracked plastic casing, and the narrow cot where my three daughters slept huddled together. His jaw tightened until the muscles in his cheek twitched.
He bent down, lifted little Lucy into his arms as if she weighed nothing at all, and took Camille’s plastic grocery bag in his other hand.
"Sophie," Richard said gently, looking down at my oldest daughter. "Hold your mother's hand. Let's go home."
Outside, the autumn sky had turned a slate gray, and a cold Texas downpour was lashing against the concrete driveway of the Carden estate. The rain hammered the roof of Richard’s black luxury sedan as we piled into the leather back seats.
Richard held his suit jacket elevated over my daughters' heads to shield them from the heavy rain as they scrambled into the car.
As the car pulled away from the circular drive, I looked back through the rain-streaked window. Theresa Carden was standing on the grand portico under the warm glow of the exterior carriage lights, watching us leave with an expression of pure, unadulterated venom.
For the first time in six years, we left that house without asking permission.
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I thought the nightmare was finally over. I thought we had escaped.
I was dangerously, tragically wrong.
