Chapter 4: Before Dawn

The house was asleep. Or it pretended to be.

Clara stood motionless beside her bedroom window, listening, as the grandfather clock downstairs chimed three times. Three o'clock. She'd been awake for hours already, afraid even a single sound would give her away too soon.

Slowly, she zipped her worn backpack shut. Inside were only the things she truly needed: a change of clothes, the little cash she'd quietly saved from tutoring and part-time shifts nobody in this house had ever asked about, her identification card. Nothing else — she'd told herself that for a week now, every time she'd been tempted to pack one more thing she didn't need.

She let herself look around the room one last time. Her eyes caught on the water stain near the ceiling, shaped a little like a rabbit if you squinted — the one she used to point out to her mother when she was small, back before this room belonged to anyone else's version of her life.

She reached for the framed photograph on her nightstand and traced her mother's smiling face with her thumb, slow, like she was trying to memorize the shape of it all over again even though she already had it memorized.

"I don't know where I'm going," she whispered, voice trembling despite every effort to keep it steady. "But I know I can't stay."

She slid the photo carefully into the bag, between the folded clothes where it wouldn't get scratched.

A floorboard creaked in the hallway.

Clara froze. Her pulse slammed once, hard, before she wrestled it back under control.

Footsteps. Someone was walking down the hall.

She switched off the bedside lamp and stood perfectly still in the sudden dark, willing her own body not to make a single sound.

The footsteps stopped just outside her door.

Silence stretched out, long enough that Clara started counting her own heartbeats just to have something to do with the fear. She held her breath.

Then the footsteps moved on.

She counted past a full two minutes before she trusted the house again.

"This is my only chance," she murmured, and opened her door.

The hallway was dark, lit only by the faint glow of the staircase lights reaching up from the floor below. She took the stairs slow and careful, one at a time — she'd grown up in this house; she knew exactly which boards complained and which stayed quiet.

Halfway down, a voice cut through the dark.

"...Who's there?"

Her heart nearly stopped. Richard.

He was still awake.

She stepped back into the shadows on instinct, her grip so tight the handrail bit back. Below her, at the end of the hallway, Richard stood rubbing his tired eyes with one hand, scanning the empty room for a few long seconds. Then, apparently convinced he'd imagined the sound, he sighed and turned back toward his own bedroom. His door clicked shut behind him.

Clara stayed frozen where she was for a long moment before she trusted her legs again.

Only once she was certain the house had truly gone quiet did she keep moving.

She reached the front door. Her hand found the cold brass handle — the same handle that had welcomed her home for years, that had never once, until tonight, felt like it might set her free instead.

She turned it. The door opened without a sound. A cool breeze brushed against her face, carrying the smell of the garden and the night air beyond it.

Clara stepped outside.

It hurt more than she'd let herself admit walking down those stairs — hurt in a way she hadn't fully braced for, standing here on the threshold with the whole house behind her, breathing and unaware. She didn't look back anyway. Not out of strength. Because she knew exactly how fast her own courage could fail

her, if she gave it the chance to.