Then footsteps approached the basement door.
The deadbolt slowly turned.
I raised the crowbar.
The door opened an inch.
And Elena’s voice came through the darkness.
“Arthur, don’t make a sound.”
For eight months, I had believed my wife was dead.
Now I was standing beneath my own house realizing that might not have been the biggest lie my family had told me. 👇
The door opened another inch, and a pale hand slipped through the gap.
“Arthur,” Elena whispered again. “Please. Not a sound.”
For one frozen second, I could not move. Every instinct in me wanted to rush up those stairs, grab her shoulders, demand an explanation for eight months of grief, a funeral, a grave, a life I had been forced to continue without her.
Then I heard a floorboard creak somewhere above the kitchen.
Elena put one finger to her lips.
Someone else was in the house.
I lowered the crowbar by an inch.
She eased through the basement doorway and closed it behind her without letting the latch catch. In the dim spill of light from the stairwell, she looked thinner than I remembered. Her hair, once silver at the temples, had been cut short and dyed dark. A faint scar crossed the edge of her jaw.
I stared at it because it was easier than looking into her eyes.
“You’re alive,” I breathed.
Her face folded with pain.
“Yes.”
I nearly struck the wall with the crowbar.
“You let me bury you.”
“I know.”
“You let me stand over a coffin.”
“I know.”
“You let me wake up every morning thinking you were dead.”
She closed her eyes.
“Arthur, I will answer everything. But not while the man upstairs is searching for the journal.”
The words cut through the shock.
“Who?”
