Chapter 2 The Room Behind the Room
The funeral home wants an answer about caskets by Thursday, and I’m just standing in my dad’s living room, stuck. I’ve been here forty minutes, trying to remember what color he liked.
Probably gray. Everything he owned was gray. His coat, his car, those three suits in his closet that looked the same to me, though he always insisted they weren’t. He’d correct me, tell me the distinctions, but I never bothered to ask what the actual difference was. In some alternate version of this week, I’d have time to feel guilty about that. Not right now.
I started in his office. It’s the easiest room to tolerate. The bedroom still smells like him, and I just can’t do that yet. The kitchen has his coffee cup in the sink, untouched since the last morning he bothered with it. But the office? That’s just paper, wood, a silence only work ever disturbed. I know how to function around work. It’s an old language I can still speak without falling apart.
I’m hunting for the obligatory things: insurance, his will… if he even had one; I don’t actually know, which lands like another small, heavy stone in all this mess. Bank statements too, since I’m apparently the only one left to close things out.
That’s when I notice the bookshelf, not quite flush against the wall.
Not much… half an inch, maybe less. The kind of detail you’d only spot if you’d spent a lifetime looking for things that didn’t quite fit: a seam off-center, a hinge oiled too recently, a piece that’s pretending a little too hard to be ordinary. That’s my job. I authenticate furniture for a living. I can spot when a Victorian desk’s got secrets. I never thought I’d recognize the trick here, in my father’s den.
So I pull on the shelf, and it pivots softly on a hinge I never knew was there… a hinge someone tended, someone who didn’t want it to stick.
Behind it? There’s a panel, and then a narrow little space, barely big enough for a drawer.
I just stare for a second. I look the way I would before touching an artifact… scanning for any hint of a trap… only, this isn’t a museum, and my dad wasn’t the booby-trapping type. At least, I don’t think he was.
Inside: a stack of cash, thick, rubber-banded, more than I’ve ever seen in one place unless it was behind glass at a bank. An American passport, deep blue, my dad’s photo… but the name is wrong. Marcus Halloway, not Calloway. Just a single letter off. It’s the kind of alias somebody picks when they know how easily the eye glosses over something almost right.
And under that: a photograph.
It’s me. I look maybe six, missing a front tooth, grinning wide on a park swing I don’t really recognize. I’m laughing at something, someone just out of frame. I have zero memory of that day or that picture.
I flip it over, just out of habit… the same instinct that made me check the morgue paperwork upside down… and there’s writing on the back. Not my dad’s. I know for sure now, the way you learn the face of a stranger after staring at one picture too long.
She has his eyes. He’ll want to know she’s safe.
No name. No date. Just that line, written with care, the same upright, tidy handwriting as the note they found in his coat pocket… the one that told me not to call the police.
So I end up sitting on my father’s office floor, holding a photo of my six-year-old self in one hand and a stranger’s message in the other. And then comes the math I don’t want to do.
Whoever wrote this knew what I looked like when I was little. Close up, not through a long lens… close enough to catch me mid-laugh. Somebody was watching me, and I didn’t even know.
He’ll want to know she’s safe.
He… whoever he is… it’s not my father. The handwriting matches the note found on my father’s body. So whoever wrote this, it’s not him. Which means there’s somebody out there… someone I’ve never met, someone who’s not here, not in this house… who’s apparently spent years getting reports about whether I’m okay.
I go through the hiding place, hands steady now… mostly because I’ve decided they’re not allowed to shake. There’s nothing else to find. No ledgers, no burner phone, no folder with “in case of emergency” scrawled on the tab like in a movie. Just that cash, the passport with its almost-right name, and a photograph of a girl who didn’t know she was already involved in something big.
I put the passport in my bag. Leave the cash behind… taking it feels like a door I’m not ready to open. Some part of me, shaped by years of inventory and provenance, won’t let me disturb the scene more than necessary.
But I keep the photo.
When I finally leave, it’s after ten. The street’s doing that late-night thing, so quiet it makes every parked car look suspicious, each shadowy presence feel like it’s been waiting for hours. I didn’t used to think this way. I used to walk to my car and barely notice the spaces between streetlights.
I get in, lock the doors before the keys are even in the ignition, and put the morgue note… the one with the address… next to the photograph on the passenger seat.
The handwriting is identical. Same slant in the capitals, same high cross on the T’s. I don’t have to guess. I earn my living authenticating signatures for people who fork over five figures just to be sure something’s real. So I’d bet my reputation on it: whoever wrote if I’m gone, don’t call the police is the same person who wrote she has his eyes on the back of a photo of six-year-old me.
So this isn’t new. Whatever this is, whoever he is, it started before my father died. It started before I was old enough to know, and apparently everyone I’ve ever trusted decided I didn’t need to.
