A Light in the Net Loft

Somebody in my aunt's locked net loft was wearing my dead sister's socks.

I saw them through the gap beneath the door: yellow wool, one heel patched red. I had made that patch on the crossing home after our last holiday. My sister had complained that it felt like a pebble.

"June?" I whispered.

The feet withdrew. Above me, a kettle clicked off.

Aunt Lorna appeared at the bottom of the stairs with her basket of mending. "You're hearing the pipes again."

I hadn't said I heard anything.

Three months earlier, June had vanished after an argument with Lorna. The police considered her a missing adult who might have left voluntarily. Our aunt considered her dead, though she never used the word where officials could hear. At home she said the sea kept what it took.

I mended nets for Lorna's chandlery and slept behind the shop. She owned the business and the building; after my parents' deaths, she had also owned most of my ideas about survival. Keep your hands working. Don't upset people who feed you.

That morning she gave me a rush order and told me the loft floor was unsafe.

"I'll move everything down when I can afford a builder."

The latch was on our side of the door. Unsafe floors didn't explain that.

I waited until she went to collect rope from the wholesaler. Then I climbed the stairs carrying tea. The wood creaked beneath my knees as I set the cup down.

"I won't open it if you don't want me to," I said.

Silence. Then three taps.

June and I had tapped three times through our bedroom wall when we were children. It meant awake, listening, don't tell.

I nearly broke the door with my shoulder. Instead I called her phone. It rang in my own pocket; Lorna had found it on the beach and given it to me after police examined it.

"Can you speak?"

A breath touched the gap. "Not here."

It sounded like June. It also sounded like someone teaching herself not to cry.

I called the missing-person officer from the pavement, where Lorna's shop camera could see me. I explained exactly what I had seen and heard, including the socks. He told me not to force the door and said someone would attend.

That should have made everything simple. But Lorna returned before the officers, and I discovered how quickly courage shrank when it had to share a kitchen with the person who paid for the electricity.

"Who were you calling?"

"The police."

Her basket hit the counter. Loose brass hooks scattered over the old wood.

"Do you want her dragged away?"

Her. I held on to that word.

Lorna sat heavily. She said June had come home confused and ashamed, that she had asked to hide, that a hospital would put her on medication. Our aunt had been keeping her safe until she could face people.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"You always push. She needs quiet."

I remembered June's last week in the shop. She had asked about wages, shown me a notebook, said our aunt owed us more than gratitude. I had told her not to start a fight over numbers.

Maybe she had stopped trusting me for a reason.

Upstairs the kettle clicked again. It had only been an hour. Someone was keeping that water hot to make another person's footsteps harder to hear.

Lorna took the stair key from her apron and held it out.

"You can see for yourself. Just tell them it was a misunderstanding."

The bargain was so familiar I almost accepted before noticing it: access now, silence afterward.

I asked her to put the key on the counter. She did, but kept her palm on it.

Outside, a car slowed. Lorna glanced toward the window. I picked up one of the brass hooks and put it in the basket because my hands needed something ordinary to do.

"I'll wait for the officers," I said.

Her fingers tightened. "Then you won't work here another day."

I looked at the staircase, at the strip of light under the loft door. Losing the room meant losing my address, my job, the only place that still smelled like childhood. Upstairs a cup scraped against a saucer.

I opened the shop door for the officers.

June stood when they entered the loft. She was thin, furious, and entirely alive. The red patch had worn almost through. She rubbed the heel with her other foot, the same irritated gesture I remembered from the holiday crossing. This time I watched her face instead of using one familiar detail to explain everything.

What mattered was the bolt, the missing key, and what June said in her own voice.

She had come back for the wage notebook. Lorna caught her searching the office, took her bag, and shut her upstairs. At first our aunt called it a night to calm down. Then a week until things settled. June had shouted while fishing engines ran below, and Lorna had told customers the building pipes were failing.

"You heard me Tuesday," June said to me.

I had. I had accepted the pipes.

The officer asked if she wanted medical help and where she wanted to go. Lorna answered. He asked June again.

She chose the hospital for an examination, then a friend's flat inland. She did not choose my company in the car.

I gave the police my account, including the sound I'd ignored. June's wage notebook was recovered from Lorna's office with her bag. Other records could establish what was owed later. That afternoon's task was getting her out.

Lorna called me ungrateful as they took her downstairs to continue the interview. I felt the word land, familiar and heavy, and kept packing.

For two weeks I slept on a friend's sofa and applied for work at a sail loft. June answered my third message with a time and a café.

I arrived without flowers or an explanation. She had ordered cake for herself.

"I should have listened," I said.

"Yes."

We sat with that. Outside, a bus pulled away toward the coast. She asked whether I still had her phone, and I put it on the table.

Then she asked me to show her how to change the account password. We did it together, and she typed the new one where I couldn't see.