The lock clicked from the hallway.
For a moment Willa simply stood there, listening. The quiet inside the room made the sounds downstairs seem even farther away, and she could hear Celeste’s footsteps moving down the corridor before they disappeared beneath the music rising from below. She tried the handle once, then again with both hands, and the second attempt confirmed what she had already understood from the sound of the lock. Her cheek burned, her wrist hurt from the fall, and the thought of the ring lying somewhere inside the wall produced a panic sharper than either injury.
Willa began pounding on the door with the flat of her hand. She called for Celeste first, then Joanne, but there was no answer from the hallway, and the party continued below with the indifference of something too large to notice one child’s voice. She hit the door harder, forcing herself to shout over the music because she knew only one person in the house could make the lock cease to matter.
“Daddy! Daddy, help me!”
Downstairs, Graham was standing near the fireplace with two investors and a member of the foundation board when he thought he heard his name. The quartet had just finished one piece, leaving a brief gap before the next, and the room changed acoustically in the absence of music. He stopped following the conversation in front of him and turned toward the staircase, uncertain whether the sound had come from upstairs or from someone behind him. One of the men continued speaking about a development project, but Graham’s attention had already shifted elsewhere.
The voice came again, faint but unmistakable.
“Daddy, help me!”
Graham moved before anyone could ask what was wrong. He crossed the foyer, passed a server carrying a tray of champagne, and took the stairs quickly enough that two guests stepped aside to let him through. By the time he reached the second floor, the formality he had maintained all evening had disappeared from his face, replaced by the focused alarm of a parent who had heard fear in a familiar voice. He called Willa’s name as he moved down the corridor, scanning the closed doors ahead.
“Willa! Willa, where are you?”
A small fist struck one of the doors at the far end of the hall.
“Daddy! I’m here!”
Graham reached the room and grabbed the handle. It turned only a fraction before stopping against the lock, and he tried it again with more force while Willa spoke from the other side, her words breaking under the effort to breathe normally. His eyes moved to the lock itself, then to the hallway, as if he expected some practical explanation to present itself before he had to consider the obvious one. The door had not jammed. Someone had locked it from outside.
Celeste appeared near the top of the stairs while he was still examining the handle. She had returned to the gala for only a few minutes before noticing his absence, and the controlled expression she wore now seemed almost unchanged from the one downstairs. She approached at a slower pace than he had, keeping her voice low enough not to carry toward the staircase.
“Leave her alone, Graham.”
He turned toward her. The sight of Celeste standing calmly in the corridor while Willa remained behind a locked door forced two incompatible versions of the evening into the same space, and Graham struggled for several seconds to make them fit. He asked where the key was, then looked back at the door when Willa called for him again. Celeste said the girl needed time to calm down and suggested they finish the gala before turning the incident into something larger.
Graham’s expression hardened. “That’s my daughter.”
Celeste stopped several feet behind him. The resentment she had hidden through the party surfaced now with less restraint, though she still spoke quietly, perhaps because part of her remained aware of the guests below. She looked at Graham, then at the locked room, and framed the conflict in the language she had been using privately for months, as if Maren’s memory, Willa’s grief, and her own place in the family had always belonged to the same argument.
“Graham… your past or me?”
He did not answer immediately because the question revealed more than Celeste seemed to realize. She believed she was asking him to choose between the life he had lost and the marriage he had built afterward, yet Willa was standing on the other side of the door she had locked. Graham looked at his wife once more, then turned back toward the room and struck the door near the latch with his shoulder.