and terrifyingly quiet. She listened to my story without interrupting. She took notes with a black pencil. When I finished, she asked one question.
“Where does he keep the things he thinks no one cares about?”
I thought of the attic.
Our house was a renovated brick carriage home on Juniper Street, the kind of place Grant liked because it photographed well. I had designed every inch of it, from the skylight above the staircase to the hidden storage built into the attic wall. Grant never climbed up there. He disliked dust, heat, and anything that required effort without an audience.
But years earlier, when we were still pretending to be happy, I had seen him carry a black trunk up the attic stairs.
“Old tax files,” he had said.
Diana’s pencil stopped moving.
“Can you get inside?”
“He changed the locks.”
“Did he change the attic?”
I looked at her.
The side door to the old potting room still had the original latch. I knew because I had asked Grant to replace it twice and he had ignored me both times.
Two nights later, I parked three streets away and walked through a freezing drizzle with my hood pulled low. Diana waited in her car at the corner, engine running, phone in hand. If Grant came home, she would call me once. If the police came, she would call twice.
The potting room smelled of wet soil and rusted tools.
My hands were numb by the time I eased the latch open.
Inside the house, everything looked staged. Brooke’s cream scarf hung over the chair by the entryway. A new candle burned on the console table. My framed photograph with Lily had been turned face down.
I did not cry.
Crying would come later, in strange places: traffic lights, grocery aisles, the laundry room at my sister’s apartment. That night, I climbed the attic stairs.
The trunk was behind the broken drafting table under a sheet of plastic.
It was locked.
I almost left.
Then I remembered Lily’s text.
Mommy, are you bad?
I searched the drawers of the drafting table until my fingers found a small brass key taped beneath the center rail. The tape was brittle with age. Grant had hidden it there because he assumed no one else in the house understood old furniture.
The lock clicked open.
Inside the trunk were not tax files.
There were folders with names on them. Women’s names. Elena Bell. Mara Henson, my maiden name. Brooke Salinger. Two others I did not recognize. There were loan papers, insurance forms, copies of identification documents, hotel receipts, and a bundle of cassette tapes secured with a rubber band. At the bottom sat a framed photograph of Grant with a young dark-haired woman on a sailboat.
Elena.
On the back, in blue ink, someone had written: If anything happens, ask about Harbor Box 19.
My whole body went cold.
I took pictures of everything. Then I took the folders.
In Diana’s car, under the orange glow of a streetlamp, we opened the first envelope.
Elena Bell had married Grant thirteen years before I did. One year later, according to the documents Grant had shown me long ago, she died in a boating accident. There had been an insurance payout. There had been debts
