She turned sharply, her heart giving a single hard knock
against her ribs. There was nothing. No movement, no shadow. Just the quiet, sunlit landing, the row of closed bedroom doors, and the faint, steady hum of the thermostat. She grabbed the crackers quickly, her hand slightly unsteady, but when she pulled open the pantry door, she hesitated. A few items inside looked subtly out of place. A cereal box leaned sideways against the one beside it, and a jar of peanuts, which she distinctly remembered being at the very front during her initial tour, was now shoved toward the back. It wasn’t anything overtly alarming, but it also wasn’t the meticulously tidy arrangement she remembered from her first day.
On Friday, she noticed the upstairs pantry again. This time, one specific snack box—a blue box of animal crackers Tommy loved—was missing entirely. Kayla checked the high shelf twice, then scanned the lower one, moving a few items aside. Nothing. She made a mental note to ask Sabrina about it, but the busy weekend routine made her forget.
When she returned upstairs the following Monday to put fresh linens away in the closet, she automatically glanced into the pantry. The missing blue box was back. It was squeezed tightly between two different cereal boxes she could’ve sworn hadn’t been there before, as if it had been hastily returned. Later that day, she mentioned the missing-and-returned snack casually to Tommy, hoping with a faint desperation that maybe he’d taken it and simply forgotten. “Did you move something from the pantry the other day, sweetie?” she asked gently while they colored at the kitchen table.
Tommy shook his head without looking up, concentrating on staying within the lines. “I can’t reach the pantry shelves,” he said simply, as if stating a fundamental law of physics. He paused, his crayon hovering, then added, “Mommy says I shouldn’t play up here alone.” He shrugged a small, child-sized shrug. “Too many things fall.” Kayla didn’t know how to respond to that. She forced a smile and followed him back downstairs when he was done, but the boy’s words, and the flat, matter-of-fact tone he’d used, stuck with her far longer than she expected.
Kayla considered asking Sabrina about it, but something about the woman’s consistently distant politeness made her hesitate. She didn’t want to sound like she was imagining things or reading too much into a child’s strange comment… even though that’s exactly what she feared she was doing. But the unease kept growing, quietly, steadily, like something waiting just out of sight on the landing, holding its breath.