She woke up on the right side of her mattress and immediately dreaded the day. She moved into this building when she was really young. She can’t remember. She was a baby. They adopted her at the local orphanage they told her. Apartment B her foster parents would call it. But she’d never see people come in and out. Her room was in the basement. It wasn’t much of a room. Grey walls and little furniture. Her parents weren’t rich. They couldn’t afford for her to go to school or go shopping. The only thing they did was stay home and go to the grocery on a weekly basis. She stayed in her room a lot. Rarely coming upstairs. Food was brought to her and she had her own restroom. The small metal toilet in the corner of the room haunted her sometimes with strange sounds and reeked with a terrible stench. The purple petunias were the closest thing to “outside” as they call it. She’d never been outside.

She has a disease she remembers them saying. She cannot go out or she’ll die. She never has tried to go outside or even upstairs. She was too afraid that her father would hurt her like last time.

She loved her petunias. They reminded her of her life before she was adopted. Though she cannot remember, she had a sense that her mother still loved her and never meant to give her up. She’s been having dreams that she would wake up in a pool of sweat on her naked mattress. She has the same dream almost every night. It started last month on her twelfth birthday. Something that led her to believe she wasn’t supposed to be there.

A woman in a field of purple. She had brown hair and light skin. But an aged face. She resembled this woman a lot. But her view became distorted and she seemed to be running toward the woman but only to find herself becoming further away from her. The sky turns black and the woman’s faced turns to panic—eyes open.

One day, she got up the courage to creep up the concrete stairs to the steel locked door waiting at the top. She held her ear against the door as she tried to listen for any conversation that might be going on.

The police said they wanted to have us come in for questioning. What are we going to do? Her mother said in an almost panicked tone. The muffled sound became harder to hear as it seemed they were walking further from the door. Why are they still on this? It’s been almost eleven years why are they so worried about her? Father said in an annoyed voice.

She backed away from the door quietly. Down the stairs and the first thing she looked at were the petunias sitting on the concrete floor next to her worn mattress. She quickly pieced together that she wasn’t adopted.

She was abducted.