The lights in the airport terminal flickered as I hurried through JFK, my phone buzzing with messages from him. I ignored them. In my pocket was a note Lily had secretly given me before everything fell apart.
RUN. DO NOT GET ON THE PLANE. LOOK FOR THE BLACK SQUARE.
Outside, surrounded by crowds and noise, I hid behind a concrete pillar and studied the note again. It showed a rough sketch of a house with a dark black square drawn beside it. The symbol terrified me because Lily had drawn it over and over until the paper nearly tore.
For weeks, a man had been following me. At first, I thought my marriage was simply struggling. Then I realized something far worse. Lily wasn’t drawing a house. She was drawing a prison.
I escaped into a crowded bus station and replayed a conversation I had overheard between my husband and one of his associates. He spoke about “clearing the inventory” in a cold, emotionless voice. At the time, I assumed he meant business. Now I feared he meant people.
As I stared at the drawing, a realization struck me. The black square wasn’t a room in the house. It marked a location in our backyard where we had buried a time capsule the previous summer. Whatever was hidden there was important enough to make me a target.
Then another memory surfaced. In my purse was an old brass key that fit only one place: the locked shed behind our house. My husband had always forbidden me from entering it.
Suddenly, everything made sense.
The house wasn’t the secret. The shed was.
Across the street, a black sedan sat idling, watching. Whoever was inside was waiting for me to make a mistake.
Instead of running away, I headed for the subway. If the truth was hidden in that shed, I was going to find it before they did. The hunt was no longer one sided. For the first time, I wasn’t running from the darkness.
I was heading straight toward it.