If the girls hadn’t escaped that morning, no one could say where they might have ended up.
A few weeks later, Camille and the twins moved in with Meredith in another city.
Before leaving, they stopped at my house one final time.
Wren handed me a drawing.
There were four stick figures standing beside a huge gray rectangle.
I smiled.
“Is that supposed to be my trash can?”
Both girls burst into giggles.
“No,” Ivy announced seriously.
“That’s the safe place.”
After their car disappeared down the street, I stood in my driveway holding that drawing.
The gray bin was still beside my garage.
Scratched plastic.
One crooked wheel.
Nothing special.
For days, I had thought Wren and Ivy climbed inside because they were terrified and desperate to hide anywhere they could.
But they hadn’t chosen the nearest hiding place.
Their mother had spent days watching the only neighbor she could see, quietly teaching her three-year-old daughters a route to safety she could only hope they would remember.
And on the morning Derek locked her downstairs, those two tiny girls remembered every word.
They weren’t hiding from the world inside my trash can.
They were waiting for me to find them.
