Chapter 3: The Tablet's Secret
The morning sun hit the breakfast bar with blinding clarity, but the air around the marble island felt like ice. Clara stood by the stove, her posture stiff, pouring coffee into a white porcelain mug with hands that didn't quite steady themselves. Richard sat at the opposite end of the long walnut table, his laptop open beside a stack of legal briefs, his eyes fixed on the glass screen of his tablet. He hadn't touched his eggs.
I sat quietly on my stool, my striped T-shirt feeling too tight across my chest, my mind still echoing with Lily's raspy whisper from the dark.
Richard’s index finger tapped sharply against the tablet screen. A faint, electronic notification chime pinged—a short, clipped tone that made Clara flinch and drop her spoon against the saucer with a sharp clatter. Richard didn't look up, but the muscles along his jawline clenched so hard I could see the skin turn white.
"Clara," Richard said, his voice dropping into that smooth, dangerous calm that preceded every major decision in our house. "Did you authorize a utility inspection for the eastern wing last Tuesday?"
My mother froze, the coffee pot hovering inches above the counter. For three seconds, she didn't breathe. Her shoulders rose and fell in a shallow, trembling motion.
"No," Clara said, her voice small and tight. "You know I didn't. We haven't had contractors here since the landscaping overhaul in spring."
Richard turned the tablet around so it faced her, though neither of them looked at me. "Someone accessed the master blueprint server from an external proxy. They pulled up the old architectural schematics for the sub-wall utility crawlspace. Specifically, partition 404."
The name hung in the air like a physical weight. Foundation 404. Lily had mentioned a crawlspace, but hearing my father use that cold, technical number made it real—a designated zone on a blueprint, treated like a storage closet or a dead pipe.
Clara set the coffee pot down, her knuckles white against the marble. "Richard, it's just a glitch. The system is old. You know the property management firm has had security leaks before."
"I don't leave security to chance," Richard interrupted, his voice rising just enough to cut her off. He stood up, closing his laptop with a sharp snap that echoed off the high ceilings. He walked over to the wall near the pantry—the exact wall where the vent grill sat just around the corner. He didn't look at the vent, but he stood close enough to it that his shadow completely covered the metal slats.
"Starting today," Richard said, looking directly at my mother, "all hallway access panels on the ground floor are going to be permanently welded shut. I’m having heavy steel security plates screwed over every vent in the house. No exceptions. We are sealing the duct network for seasonal HVAC conversion."
My heart hammered against my ribs. Welded shut. If he put steel plates over the vents, Lily would have no air, no light, no way to reach out.
"Richard, isn't that a bit extreme?" Clara asked, though her voice lacked any real defiance; it was the sound of a woman trapped in a machine she had helped build.
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"It's necessary," Richard replied coldly, grabbing his suit jacket from the back of the chair. He looked down at me, his dark eyes narrowing slightly as if he could read every frantic thought racing through my head. "Ethan. Stay out of the kitchen today. Your mother will keep you upstairs."
He turned and walked out toward the foyer, his leather shoes clicking sharply against the floor. As the front door clicked shut, Clara turned to me, her face pale, her eyes filled with a desperate, terrifying warning. But I didn't look away this time. The blueprints were in his study, and the latches were somewhere behind the pantry wall. I had to find a way in before the steel plates arrived.
