Part 3
My phone rang.
I smiled before answering.
“Hi, Dad.”
His voice came warm and tired through the speaker.
“You at the museum?”
“Yeah.”
“Any doors locked?”
I looked around the atrium.
At the open exits.
At the sunlight.
At the silence that no longer felt like fear.
“No,” I said. “Not tonight.”
“Good.”
I was about to hang up when something made me pause.
Across the atrium, near the base of the marble column, I noticed a small brass plate I had never seen before. It was half-hidden beneath the restored molding, polished but old.
I walked toward it slowly.
There were no names on it.
Only my father’s tiny engraved handwriting.
The same handwriting from my birthday cards.
I knelt and read the words.
For Cassandra, who was never trapped. She was only waiting for the right door to close.
I pressed my palm against the plate.
And for the first time since the night everything shattered, I did not think of Adrian’s hand, Conrad’s lies, or the crowd that looked away.
I thought of my father at a kitchen table, folding blueprints with shaking hands.
I thought of my mother running into the dark to save me.
I thought of every locked door I had survived.
May you like
Then I stood.I turned toward the open entrance of the museum.
And I walked out into the light.
