Every Precious Thing

CHAPTER ELEVEN

After weeks of silence, there were nights Sara would forget to bring the phone into the bedroom with her when she went to sleep. That’s why she didn’t hear it the first time it rang several hours before she woke.

When it rang the sixth time, she was still in bed but awake, feeling the weight of another day ahead of her. The sound had been faint, almost imperceptible, but after so long in the cabin, hearing all the noises the walls and the surrounding woods made, the ring was like a fire alarm.

She jumped out of bed, raced into the other room, and grabbed the phone off the couch, afraid she’d arrived too late.

“Hello?” she huffed. “Hello? Hello?”

“Where the hell have you been?”

“What do you mean? Here. Where else would I be?”

“I’ve been calling you for hours.”

“I…I didn’t hear the phone ring.”

“Sara, you have to hear it.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll turn the volume up.”

There was a pause, then her caller said, “Things are happening.”

Sara tensed.

“You need to be ready in case you need to move in a hurry. You remember the escape route?”

Sara closed her eyes, her shoulders sagging at the inevitability of it all. She had hoped they’d succeeded, that she had made a clean disappearance. But…

“I remember,” she said.

“Good.”

Her caller hung up.

Sara stared at the wall. Just moments before she had been suffocating at the thought of living through another boring day of nothing. Now she would give anything for another one like that.

God only knew if she would ever have another quiet day.