The last voices from the house had faded. Light still shone through a single upstairs window, while the garden lay in darkness.
“Not here.”
He replaced the empty hiding stone and led me to storage. Mom waited awake on a narrow bed in last Christmas’s cardigan, a battery lamp on a crate between the mattresses. At the sight of me, she covered her mouth.
“Gabriel.”
Only Mom called me Gabriel now; hearing it revealed her fear. I hugged her, and she held me as she’d done when seventeen-year-old me left
