Sarah bolted upstairs. The nursery door hung open. Inside, the walls were covered—floor to ceiling—in crayon drawings done in frantic red: stick-figure families of five holding hands, then four, then three, the missing ones crossed out with violent X’s. At the bottom of every drawing, the same warning in a child’s shaky block letters: DON’T FINISH THE PATTERN. The crayons lay scattered like someone had been interrupted mid-drawing. One was still warm. Sarah heard giggling behind her—wet, bubbling, coming from inside the closet. She didn’t want to open it. She had to. When she did, five tiny hospital bracelets fluttered down from the rod above, each tagged with a different decade: 1974, 1989, 2003, 2017… and the fifth one blank, waiting.
