And that night, when she returned to her room, she found a small piece of paper on her bed, it hadn't been there before. It was neatly folded, and on the back, there was a simple drawing of a crying child. She opened it, and inside was a single sentence written in a sharp, tense hand: "Stop. Don't dig up the grave."
Céline froze, staring at the paper. She wasn't just frightened; she felt something deeper as if an unseen hand had placed this message in her room while she wasn't looking, as if even the walls could no longer be trusted.
Who had left it? When? How did they get in? The doors had been locked, the windows too. It couldn't have been anyone from inside the house… but could it be Marcus? Impossible… though he did know she wanted to save Lilia. Or was it Marlene? No… that wasn't her way. And Lilia was just a child, she knew nothing. So who was watching her this closely? Had they been behind her all along? And why?
She folded the note and hid it inside a metal box in her wardrobe. Then she sat on the floor, staring at the walls of her room as if trying to see beyond them. She knew time was running out, one wrong move could expose everything, or take Lilia from her forever. Céline didn't know what to do for the moment. She decided to meet Eva the next day and tell her what she had found, though she could hardly bear to wait. Her mind was bursting from thinking without finding answers to the thousands of questions spinning inside her head.
So she threw herself onto the bed, pulled the nightgown over her face, closed her eyes, and stopped thinking. Soon after, she drifted into a deep sleep...
To be continued...