✅ Over Protected

10. Alice Sneaks Around

This bonus chapter is dedicated to Jordan, with thanks again for all the support you have given me!

I hesitated at the door. This was Sarah's room, and she hadn't given me permission to be in there. I told myself that it wasn't going to be a problem, that it wasn't such a big deal. I was just going to take a couple of diapers out of the pack, and she would never mind. I could even leave a note for Mum, to explain what I had done.

It wasn't like I was intending to steal, or that I was jealous of the cuter designs. It was just that I'd knocked a glass of juice off my desk. Thankfully it had landed on my pack of diapers, saving the floor from a proper soaking. The amount that had splashed on the carpet had been cleaned up by a spritz of carpet shampoo and spreading a towel over it for an hour. But that meant I didn't have any diapers until Mum bought the next pack. And because of the conflicting demands of work and school schedules, tonight was the only time that Mum would be able to take Sarah to the doctor. She needed to see a specialist, apparently, to work out why she had been wetting the bed more and more often even after testing negative for the virus.

They would be back really late tonight, and Sarah would be wanting to go straight to bed. I didn't want to bother them. Just a couple of diapers; it would be easy enough. And less of a problem than sleeping without them. Maybe Mum would say that I could have just gone back to not wearing them; but the rules had been that we should both be in diapers, and she'd never changed that. The last time she bought a new pack, she had told me I didn't have to wear them if I didn't want to; but I'd said that wouldn't have been fair to Sarah.

No, I wanted to keep on wearing them. They were comfortable, and they made it easier to sleep. So I'd carefully written a message, saying that I'd spilled juice over the last few diapers in my pack, and I didn't know if Mum had any more stashed somewhere, so I'd borrowed a couple of Sarah's ones. Sarah wouldn't be upset, if it meant she needed two fewer nights of dryness before she would have a chance to wear big-girl pants again. And I had the note in my hand now, so that I could place it in the pack where the missing diapers would have been. She wouldn't need to worry where they had gone before going to bed, and by then I would already be asleep. I really hoped Mum wouldn't be mad in the morning, but I didn't worry too much. I was just doing the most logical thing.

I noticed that book was on the desk again. And there was a bookmark in it this time. Sarah really had been trying, and I was sure that if she could have stopped her accidents just by force of will, or by learning how to sleep differently, she would have managed it by now. The virus must have left some lasting damage, or something like that... but Mum still kept reassuring Sarah that it would get better. It was hard to believe that Sarah wouldn't have watched the news herself, so maybe she was just trying to stay hopeful. Maybe being treated like a baby was a kind of therapy, in that way. Because so long as Mum kept treating the bedwetting as something she would grow out of, Sarah wouldn't have to give up hanging onto a slim thread of hope.

I couldn't help wondering if that was why the punishment had lasted so long. Or perhaps it really was the only way Mum could get Sarah to behave responsibly. Mum had told me already that Sarah had done some things that were too serious for me to even know about; she wasn't mature enough, and she took silly risks. So if there was some medicine or whatever that would help her, maybe treating her like a baby and taking all her choices away was the only way to make her take it.

In any case, I wasn't here to be thinking too much about Sarah's problem. I just needed diapers. Feeling like a thief in the night, I crept over to the dresser. I knew which drawer the stuff was in, because it was in sight of the doorway and I'd seen Sarah lifting things out when I was passing the room a few times; and more recently Mum opening the same drawer while Sarah was lying just out of sight on the bed.