Todos os capítulos de When Winter Blooms: Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 5

I almost turned back in the elevator.I'm not even joking, I was standing there on the forty-second floor, watching the numbers climb, and I genuinely considered pressing the lobby button and telling the agency I got food poisoning or something. But I needed this job badly, So I fixed my blazer, told myself to act like a person who had it together, and waited for the doors to open.They opened directly into the apartment.I stepped out and immediately felt like I'd walked into a photo shoot that hadn't started yet. Everything was white and grey and expensive-looking. A kitchen that had probably never been used. Furniture that looked like it had been placed with a ruler.Not a single crayon anywhere. Not a small shoe left in the middle of the floor the way every child I'd ever worked with left their shoes in the middle of the floor.I was starting to wonder if the four-year-old was fictional when I heard footsteps.He came from a hallway to the right. Tall, putting on a dark suit.

I've always been a light sleeper.My mum used to say it was because I spent so many years listening for my brother at night, listening for the particular sound of him getting up for water, or having a bad dream, or just being five years old and scared of something he couldn't name. You train yourself after a while. Your ears learn to stay half-open even when the rest of you is gone.So when I heard Lily at 12:43 am, I was already sitting up before I was fully awake.It wasn't a big sound. it wasn't a scream, the way you'd expect. It was small. A small, thin sound, the kind that comes from a child who's been crying long enough to run out of volume. Like she'd been at it for a while before I heard her.I was down the hall in seconds.Her nightlight was on, a little cloud-shaped thing that threw soft blue light across the ceiling and she was sitting up in bed with Gerald crushed against her chest, face wet, breathing in that hiccuping, ragged way that meant she'd been crying hard an

I wasn't supposed to fall asleep.That's the thing, I had a perfectly good bed, a great bed, honestly, the most expensive mattress I'd ever slept on in my life. Eleven steps down the hall, I had no reason to be on the living room floor at 11:45 on a Thursday night except that Lily had wanted one more game, and somewhere between building a blanket fort and losing three rounds of Snap to a four-year-old, I had apparently just... stopped.I don't even remember it happening. One minute I was shuffling cards. The next I was gone.I came back slowly.Not all the way at first, just enough to be aware of warmth, and the faint sound of the city outside the windows, and the fact that I was moving. Which was wrong, because I hadn't been moving. I'd been on the floor.I was not on the floor anymore.My brain arrived at this information and then just sat with it for a moment, slow and unhelpful, while the rest of me caught up. I was being carried, that was the only word for it. One arm under m