I was heating soup in the kitchen when Grace came in and tugged my sleeve. Her face was serious in that way children’s faces become when they have figured out something important and they are about to share it.
“Do you want to meet my mom?” she asked.
I froze mid-stir.
“What?” I asked.
She nodded like this was a perfectly normal question and a simple yes or no would suffice.
“Do you want to meet my mom? She liked hide-and-seek too.”
My heart started pounding in a way that felt disproportionate to what she had asked. But there was something about her tone that made the back of my neck prickle.
“Grace,” I said carefully, setting down the spoon, “what do you mean?”
Emily wandered in behind her, dragging a stuffed rabbit by one ear.
“Mommy is downstairs,” she said with the certainty of someone stating a fact so obvious it shouldn’t require explanation.
My hands went cold.
“Downstairs where?” I asked.
Grace grabbed my hand and started pulling me down the hallway.
“The basement. Come on. Daddy takes us to see her.”
Every terrible thought hit me at once—the locked door, the secrecy, the way the girls looked at it when they thought nobody was watching. A dead wife. A basement Daniel never opened around me. A locked door with a new brass lock.
Grace pulled me down the hallway like she was showing me a birthday surprise, and my mind was already running through scenarios I didn’t want to imagine.
At the door, she looked up at me with complete innocence and said, “You just have to open it.”
“Does Daddy take you down there?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.
She nodded. “Sometimes. When he misses her.”
I tried the knob. Locked.
“Grace, how does Daddy open it?” I asked.
“He has a key in the kitchen,” she said. “But you can also use hairpins like Mommy taught me.”
In that moment, I should have waited. I should have walked upstairs and found Daniel and asked him to explain this directly. But I was panicked and frightened and operating on the kind of instinct that makes people do things they later regret.
I pulled two hairpins from my bun and knelt by the lock with shaking hands. Emily stood beside me, sniffling. Grace bounced on her toes. The lock clicked open after thirty seconds.
I froze.
“See?” Grace whispered.
I opened the door.
What A Woman Found When She Discovered The Shrine Her Husband Had Been Hiding
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