Chapter 2: The Voice at the Door
Part 2 — Comment Continuation
I stood there dripping wet, Sophie still shaking in my arms, and I stared at that key.
Vanessa moved toward it fast.
Too fast.
"Give me that," she said.
Her voice was different now.
No smile.
No softness.
I stepped between her and the key.
"What does this open, Vanessa?"
She laughed.
Short and sharp.
"It's nothing.
A storage unit.
You're making a scene over nothing."
But Sophie pressed her face against my shoulder and whispered something I almost missed.
"Mommy gave me the bear before she went to the hospital.
She said never let anyone take it."
My chest went cold.
Sophie's mother had been sick for eight months before she passed.
Vanessa had come into our lives four months after the funeral.
I looked at the key again.
It was old.
Worn at the edges.
The kind that opens something that hasn't been touched in a long time.
Vanessa's phone buzzed.
She glanced at the screen and her jaw tightened.
She looked up at me with something I had never seen on her face before.
Fear.
"Don't," she said quietly.
"You don't know what you're getting into."
That was when I heard the front door open behind us.
And a voice I hadn't heard in over two years said my name.
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What Sophie's mother hid inside that bear — and who just walked through that door — changes everything.
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