For months, I had respected my mother-in-law’s strict insistence on keeping the guest room entirely private. The morning after she moved out, I discovered she had been hiding something under that bed that was deeply unsettling.
The guest room finally smelled of fresh, empty air instead of Jacqueline’s lavender lotion or Theodore’s peppermint cologne. Only a faint, yeasty warmth lingered in the corner, a peculiar scent that I had never quite been able to place. I brushed the strange odor off because the cool autumn breeze was drifting through the window and bright sunshine hit the bare mattress.
I stood at the foot of the bed with my hands on my hips and smiled warmly at the open space. Six whole months had passed, and now this room was finally mine again.
“Goodbye, guest room,” I announced to the quiet walls. “Hello, brand-new home office!”
I grabbed the elastic corner of the fitted sheet and gave it a firm yank.
“Oh, come on, don’t stick now,” I muttered when the sheet failed to yield.
From a few rooms away down the hallway, I could hear my husband, Zachary, moving around the kitchen as he rinsed a coffee mug in the sink. He had offered to help me strip the bed, but I had waved him off because I really wanted to reclaim this room myself.
The sheet stuck again, stubbornly refusing to budge from the corner.
I gave the fabric another strong pull while thinking about my own mother, who had also been a woman of closed doors and tight secrets. My mind drifted back to the troubling things that had surfaced from behind her bedroom door when I was twelve years old.
Jacqueline was nothing like my mother. My mother-in-law was a devout churchgoer who organized my pantry spices by color and once apologized profusely for using too much soap on my good dinner plates.
Still, Jacqueline had kept that guest bedroom door shut tight every single day.
I braced my knee against the edge of the mattress and pulled hard on the fitted sheet.
“Just let go already,” I muttered under my breath while fighting the elastic.
Two weeks ago, I had walked past this closed door and heard low, rhythmic humming inside, as if someone were softly chatting with a houseplant. A month before that, my father-in-law, Theodore, had ambled into the kitchen laughing about her secret little projects.
