Page 31 of If Anything Happens To Me

“She did what he told her, but sometimes he did what she told him. Like I told you, she had her own bed, a nice one. And my sister and I had mattresses on the floor.”

“She slept in the same room as you?” I asked.

Iris frowned. “Some nights. Not always. And it wasn’t sleep. It was . . . She kept dying. Then coming back to life.”

“What?”I asked. A chill went through me.

“That’s too creepy to be real, right?” Iris asked. “I must have dreamed that.”

I held back from saying yes. It was way too creepy.

“Tell us more about her,” Matt said. “The things that are real, not dreams.”

“I couldn’t tell if she was a girl he’d kidnapped, like us, but who got on his good side. Or whether she was in on it from the start, because they were definitely a team,” Iris said. “Whenever she spoke to us, she would whisper, as if she didn’t want him to hear.”

“Was he always there?” Matt asked.

“No, and that’s another strange thing. It seemed as if he was spying on us, even when he wasn’t in the room . . .” Iris trailed off. “He slept in the building.”

“Building? Not a house?” I asked.

But she didn’t answer.

“What kinds of things would Gale say?” Matt asked. “When she whispered?”

“I remember once she said, ‘I’m sorry for everything. It’s my fault you’re here.’?”

“Did she explain that?” I asked.

Iris seemed drifty for a few moments. “No. She told me to stay positive, that he’d eventually let us go. She said that the other girl’s death had been an accident, it wouldn’t happen to us.”

“What other girl?” I asked, the top of my scalp tingling.Eloise?

Iris kept talking, as if she hadn’t heard my question. “I tried to have as positive an attitude as possible—for Hayley’s sake. I was trying to keep my sister’s spirits up, so we could stay strong and escape when we got the chance.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“Sometimes I felt bad for her—for Gale.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Her eyes looked sad. She looked tired all the time. Obviously because she didn’t sleep well, she . . .”

My stomach clenched, because I had the feeling Iris was about to say “died” again. It was too upsetting to consider. But instead, she went in another direction.

“She hardly ever spoke,” Iris said. “She didn’t smile a lot, and seemed to be kind of curled in on herself. You know? Her shoulders were always hunched over, as if something inside really hurt.”

“Like she’d been injured?”

Iris shook her head. “No. More like her heart ached.”

That rang a bell with me. Since losing Eloise, there were times I couldn’t stand up straight. My heart had been bruised the day my sister went missing; when I found out she was dead, it completely shredded. Even now, if I heard her name, my shoulders instinctively curved forward, my whole body making a protective little cave around my broken heart.

“It sounds as if she’s mourning someone,” I said.

“I don’t know,” Iris said. “She was always exhausted, and sometimes she got sick. I’d hear her throwing up in the bathroom. I said to her one time, ‘You’re sick because of what he’s doing to us. Keeping us here.’?”

“What did she say to that?”

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