Maybe she could just say that she’d forgotten to put her garbage out in the can earlier that evening – why she had decided to do so in the middle of the night instead of waiting until that morning and hoping she beat the garbage-man might be more difficult to explain.
But what were the chances they would happen to wake up and come out into the hall, anyway? ‘They get bigger the longer you stand here debating,’ she reminded herself. And besides, if they did wake up, they’d probably hear somebody wandering through the house, so perhaps seeing that her door was open would assure them that it was just her, searching for a midnight snack or something.
She had to slow down even more once she was through the hall. It was always hard to tell just what configuration the chairs in the dining room would be in, and then once she was in the living room, she had to try to avoid any of Camelia’s toys that might have been left there when she had been sent to bed. And, of course, there were the couches and the various end and coffee tables to avoid – she was pretty sure she knew where they were, but every time she let herself get too confident, she’d end up running straight into them.
The sound of the lock on the front door clicking open seemed to echo throughout the house, far louder than she could ever remember it sounding before. ‘I should have brought my key,’ she fretted. If -that- had woken somebody up, they might come to investigate, and if they saw the door unlocked, they would be sure to change that, thus trapping her outside. But it was far too late to worry about that now, so instead she slowly pulled the front door open just enough to squeeze out of it.