The key would not turn.
I twisted it harder, metal biting into the soft pad of my thumb, and heard Wade make a sound behind me that was halfway between clearing his throat and asking permission to interfere. The storage facility corridor smelled of concrete dust, hot metal, and somebody’s leaking lawn mower gasoline. Fluorescent tubes hummed above us with the relentless cheerfulness of a place where nothing important was supposed to happen.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I was about to tell you it turns left.”
I looked over my shoulder.
Wade raised both hands. “That’s all.”
Elise stood beside him with her purse tucked under one arm and both lips pressed inward. She had offered to drive me three separate times that morning, and three separate times I had told her I was perfectly capable of driving twenty-two minutes to a storage facility without killing us all. Jonah had said almost nothing since arriving at my house. Now he leaned against the opposite row of blue metal doors with his arms crossed, staring at the number 214 as though he might burn through it by concentration alone.
