‘We’re done raising you. Don’t embarrass us while we’re gone.’, my mother said as they left for Europe. Then they locked the basement. Days later, the smell hit them before the blood did. ‘Oh my God… what did she do?’ my sister whispered.
My name is Lena Cross, and I was eight months pregnant when they locked me in the basement.
“We’re going to Europe tomorrow. Watch the house,” my father, William, had said flatly over his shoulder, like I was just another appliance to leave on standby. My mother, Diane, didn’t even look at me. And my sister—Chloe, two years older and always the golden child—smirked. “Just give birth already and get out of here,” she muttered.
I was sitting at the kitchen table, swollen ankles propped on a chair, trying to hold back tears. The house echoed with rolling luggage wheels, light laughter, and the clicking of my sister’s heels. I didn’t reply. I had long since learned silence was safer.
Then Chloe turned back, eyes narrowing with a strange mix of irritation and glee. “Actually, come with me,” she said.
I hesitated. “Why?”
“Just come,” she snapped, grabbing my arm.
I barely had time to react before she was dragging me toward the basement. I stumbled with her down the creaking stairs, the air growing colder, damper with each step.
“Wait, Chloe—” I started, but she gave me a sharp shove, sending me staggering onto the concrete floor. My belly hit first. Pain bloomed instantly in my abdomen.
Before I could scream, the door slammed shut. A second later, the bolt clicked from the other side.
My scream never left my throat. I pounded the door, crying out. “Chloe! Let me out! Please!” Nothing.
For the next hour—or maybe it was three—I screamed, begged, and clawed at the wooden frame until my voice broke. The only response was silence. They were really gone. They’d left me down here.
Time warped. It was cold, dark, and damp. I had no food. No water. I had my phone, but no service. A cracked window high up on the wall showed gray daylight—then night. Then daylight again.
On the second day, the contractions started.
They were sharp. Deep. Rolling over me like waves. I lay on the concrete floor, moaning, sweating, biting down on a rag I’d torn from my shirt. I didn’t even know what I was doing—no one ever taught me. I was nineteen. A shame to my family. A burden.
Blood came early. Too early. Then pain. A tightening pressure that built and built, until I thought my spine might snap in two. I screamed, and screamed, and no one answered.
When I felt something slide out of me, I didn’t know if it was the baby… or something broken inside.
Then it all went still.
Days later—three, maybe four—I was curled up in the same corner, dried blood stuck to my thighs and floor, when I heard voices. Keys. The door unlocking.
My mother’s voice.
“…Why is it so cold down here?”
Then: “What… what is this…?”
A shriek.
I blinked up at the dim light flooding in, as my mother stared at the thick, dark red liquid that had oozed from beneath the door and across the wood floor like a living stain.
Her face went pale.
“Jesus Christ,” Chloe whispered behind her.
And I smiled.
The first thing they did wasn’t call an ambulance. It was Chloe who stepped in, nose wrinkling, and muttered, “It smells like a sewer down there.”
My father, now back from sipping wine in Italy or wherever the hell they’d gone, moved toward the door slowly, a handkerchief pressed to his nose. “Lena?” he called, not out of concern—more like testing if something would jump out.
I didn’t. I was too weak.
The baby hadn’t made it. I’d wrapped him in an old towel I found behind a stack of paint cans. A boy. Still. Warm, for a time. Then not.
They never looked for him.
Instead, they called someone else.
Dr. Janet Cleaves, a psychiatrist friend of Diane’s, came the next morning. She didn’t ask if I needed a doctor. She didn’t ask if I wanted the police.
She asked, “Lena, why did you go into the basement?”
My voice cracked. “They locked me in.”
Chloe snorted. “She’s always been dramatic. She was probably trying to punish us.”
Punish them? I nearly died down there.
But they’d spun their version already. That I was unstable. That I snuck into the basement in a hormonal episode and refused to come out. That maybe I even harmed the baby in some twisted attempt to get attention.
And I had no proof. No photos. No footage. Just blood, and bruises, and silence.
The funeral was private. No birth certificate. No death certificate. Just a discreet cremation, arranged within days.
They didn’t ask if I wanted to name him.
My mother’s tone had been curt: “This is the last time, Lena. No more stunts. No more mistakes.”
I was moved into the guest house, “until you’re better.” Chloe avoided me like I was a disease.
But at night, I could hear them whispering. Planning.
Selling the house. Sending me away. Somewhere “quiet.”
Except I remembered something. The bolt on the basement door had been installed the day before they left. I saw my father doing it.
They’d planned it. Not just Chloe—all of them.
It wasn’t spontaneous cruelty. It was deliberate. They’d wanted me gone, silent, out of the picture. Whether I made it out or not…
…didn’t seem to matter.
So I stopped crying.
And started planning.
Two months later, the house was back on the market. A new coat of paint over the blood-stained floorboards. A new story for the neighbors: “Lena had a nervous breakdown. She’s getting help now.”
But I hadn’t left.
They thought I was in a treatment facility in Vermont. That’s what the paperwork said.
In reality, I was in a small apartment downtown, paid for by my friend Mara—the only person I ever told the truth. The same friend who brought me food after the birth. Who helped me bury my son in a cemetery under a false name: James.
She helped me disappear.
And she helped me build the file.
Photos of the basement. The bolt. My bruises. The blood. Doctor’s reports. Even Chloe’s emails, forwarded from an old shared laptop.
“God, I hope she just dies in there. It’s not like anyone will miss her.”
I sent the first package to Diane’s workplace. The second to William’s church. The third to Chloe’s fiancé.
Then I waited.
The cracks showed fast.
Whispers. Rumors. Investigations.
But that wasn’t the end.
I wanted them to feel it. Not just fear—but helplessness.
One night, Chloe came home to find her front door wide open. Nothing stolen. Just a single item on the kitchen table:
The baby towel. Washed. Folded.
A note under it, written in my hand:
“You said to give birth and leave. I did. Now it’s your turn.”
Then Diane got a phone call at 3 a.m. No one on the line. Just the faint sound of a baby crying.
Then silence.
It was subtle, always. Never enough to charge. Never enough to arrest.
But they knew.
And one day, when the news broke—when the truth unraveled, and Diane lost her career, William was asked to step down from his board, and Chloe’s fiancé left her on the morning of their wedding—they all looked around in shock, in confusion.
“Who would do this to us?”
But I never had to say a word.
And every time they passed a shadowed alley or an open basement door, they wondered—
If I was standing just behind it.
