Nothing is ever perfect.
But it's better, she thinks.
Her new gloves perk up the gray school uniform immensely.
Her best friends come to visit for a week before school starts.
And the door stays closed.
Her mother doesn't have buttons for eyes, and that's something for which to be grateful.
Wybie can talk, the cat can't, and she's okay.
One of the first things she does after she returns home, safe and sound, is she removes all the buttons from her clothes. She throws them down the well and runs away before she can hear the splash. It takes years before she can look at a button again without panicking.
It's getting better, though.
Once, months after it happened, she sneaked down at night and peeked through the keyhole of the door, just to make sure, but it was just bricks. Just bricks, nothing more. It could have been a dream. Certainly her parents think so.
But she knows, she knows when the cat stares at her with his big blue eyes, when the jumping mice send her secret messages, when she talks to Wybie's grandmother about the missing sister. She knows it was real. She knows she fought the Other Mother, and she won. She's safe now. The key is long gone.
It rained for ten days and ten nights after it happened. It was a new start, a cleansing, the rain washing away the fear.
Her parents don't see anything different. They know a few things, they know that she's now got extreme arachnophobia and that she avoids the drab living room at all costs. She doesn't play with dolls anymore. In some ways, it changed her.
It certainly changed the way she saw her folks. Now she values the little things, the things her mother does for her that she didn't see before. Her mother is good. The Other Mother was good to her too, but she was too good. The Other Mother was the sort of sickly sweet that fills the nostrils and chokes. Real Mother is softer, cleaner, more like rain. Realer.
Things change. Life goes on. Coraline takes singing lessons from the crazy actresses downstairs. Mr. B teaches her Russian. She and Wybie play after school, and sometimes her mom lets her out even when it's raining.
Wybie doesn't understand everything, but he knows enough. He gets her in a way none of the others do. Coraline and Wybie and Cat; they're a team.
She's not alone in this, not anymore.
