"Yeah. So, he left the hospital without telling us, went to watch the sunset over the ocean, and got a bullet in the brain for it."
Six months later …
The fall night is sticky and oppressive. Too hot to be October, even in Sherwood. I wake up unable to breathe. Instinct stretches my hand to the side, but I find nothingness. Sam is on duty tonight, leaving my sweaty sheets empty and still. The stifling air around me is too quiet. It swells in my lungs rather than giving me a fresh breath. I can't force the air in.
My body feels impossibly heavy. Like I'm being pulled down into the mattress. At the same time, something aches at the very center of my being. A blast of force in my gut propels me up. Barely realizing what I'm doing, I run up into the attic.
I haven't climbed these stairs in months. My bare feet take them two at a time, nearly slipping from the edges. Fine dust on the bare wood floor feels soft on my skin. A fleeting thought goes through my mind, wondering if I'm leaving footprints. Wondering if anyone would notice.
Each second burns in my lungs. The air isn't any easier to breathe up here. There are no windows I can open. This attic was used once. Many years ago. Many people ago. In the recesses of my mind, corners I rarely venture into anymore, there are memories of that time. Of the little table that used to sit against one of the walls, adorned with a tiny lamp. It looked like an urn. Rounded white porcelain with pink Rosas painted on it. The shade had deep pleats, like the ones in my grandmother's skirts when she went to church on Wednesday nights. They were her casual skirts, the ones that brushed her calves and hung in heavy cornflower wool from the wide band at her waist.
The table isn’t there anymore. Neither is the hulking armoire that used to stand against the other wall. Swallowing up the empty space as if to declare there was nothing else for this room to be. It stood in front of a part of the wall with textured wallpaper lined up perfectly. Like it had been there as long as the wall itself. But there was more to the wall behind where it once stood.
Bits of the wallpaper still speckle the floor, fallen from the long, torn pieces hanging like ripped flesh from the gaping gash in the wall. There's darkness beyond it. The door still stands open, just as I left it that day months ago. When I took an axe and smashed the facade away and uncovered all the secrets of this house.
Much of what I took out of the secret room that day and in the ones that followed is sitting in an evidence locker somewhere, waiting to be used in the ongoing trial. But there are still remnants. The shelves are still nailed into the walls. Tables still sit in corners. Some crates are scattered across the floor, with papers threatening to spill off the edges. I can't see them in the darkness, but they're there.
The floodlight Sam brought over is still sitting in the middle of the attic floor. I turn it on. White light explodes, so intense it could cut through stone, sending shadows back behind their objects. Everything is illuminated.
I step inside and look around, then reach for the nearest shelf.
Sam finds me the next morning asleep on the floor of the attic, my hands bloodied and raw, the space around me cluttered with broken shelves and crates dragged across the floor.
The room is empty.
Chapter One Now
"Babe?"
Sam's voice drifts up the stairs into the attic, and I stand up from where I've been hunched over painting the new baseboards in the tiny room.
"I'm up here, Sam," I call down to him and step back to look at the coat of paint.
For years I forgot this room was even here. It was one of many parts of my childhood that got so twisted and blended with questions and false memories; it stopped existing in my mind. It wasn't until I saw a similar room in the house across the street that I started questioning my memories of my grandparents’ home. Pam, the representative from the property management company, mentioned the feature exists in almost every house on the street. But that only served to deepen that wedge in my memory. What was the difference between what I remembered and what was the truth?
A series of events last year brought those memories crashing down on me, and a few precise blows with an axe literally thrust them in front of my eyes. Along with long-buried secrets about my family that still linger with me.
It's taken months for me to be ready to face it like this. For a long time, I just kept pretending it wasn't there. The information sealed up behind the wall shattered my understanding of my life. Forced me to come face-to-face with horrible realities I thought might destroy me, even as they filled gaps in my understanding and answered questions I'd carried with me my whole life. After Greg's murder and the crushing investigation that followed, I simply pushed the room back out of my mind.
But even that couldn’t last long. I went from not ever going into my attic and ignoring that I'd ever seen the room to tearing it apart in a split second.
I had been back in therapy for a few weeks at that point, but it wasn't doing much for me. The block against it wasn't new. From the first time Creagan funneled me into the therapist’s office as a condition of continuing to work for the Bureau, I resisted. No one could possibly understand what I went through when I was younger or how it continues to impact
