Unwanted visitors

Ashley's POV

On the evening that everything changed, I was all alone in the apartment that Jeff and I shared. He had gone out earlier in the morning to attend an event, and he was, so it was just me at home.

That day I did laundry, and I was folding the laundry when I heard a knock on the door. I didn’t think anything of it at first. I just reckoned that it was probably my neighbor and friend, Clara’s children, who were back from school and were hungry, so they had come to ask me if I had anything for them to eat.

Clara was a middle-aged single mom who lived downstairs in the same building as me. I had struck up a tentative and unlikely friendship with her, so much so that she trusted me to feed her children whenever she wasn’t around.

I didn’t mind this at all, after all, I knew firsthand what it was like to be hungry … as in, so desperately hungry that it felt like your insides were about to claw their way out of you.

Even though Clara was in her early fifties, her children were qui