This Time, I Remember Every Lie He Told Me

The Room With No Windows

I didn't sleep that night.

I lay beside Callan in the dark, my back to him, listening to the slow, even rhythm of his breathing, and thought about how easily a man could sleep soundly after saying the words “I'll handle her” about his own wife. He didn't stir once. Didn't dream, as far as I could tell, of anything that might have troubled a guiltier man.

I waited until his breathing dropped into the deep, unmoving pattern I remembered from three years of marriage, the pattern that meant he was truly gone, not performing sleep the way he performed everything else before I slipped out from under the sheets.

The photograph was still tucked in my dress, hanging now in the closet like nothing had happened. I retrieved it and studied it again under the thin light of my phone screen. Marisol's laugh. Callan's careless arm. A dock somewhere with water so blue it didn't look real.

On the back, beneath her name, I noticed something I'd missed the first time: a smaller inscription, cramped into the corner, nearly illegible.

“Cellar door, west wing. Ask her about the room with no windows.”

Not Callan's handwriting. Not Marisol's either, I guessed, based on the looping, hurried script too anxious, too urgent, like someone had scrawled it in a hurry, afraid of being caught in the act of writing it at all.

I knew the west wing. I'd walked past it a hundred times in my other life, always assuming the locked door at the end of the corridor led to nothing more interesting than old furniture and disused linens. I had never once thought to ask what a house this large might be hiding beneath itself.

I quietly dressed in jeans, a dark sweater pulled from the back of my closet, shoes I could move silently in and made my way through the sleeping house.

The west wing corridor was colder than the rest of the estate, the temperature dropping the further I walked, like the house itself wanted to discourage visitors. The cellar door was exactly where the note promised, at the end of the hall behind a tapestry so old the threads had gone brittle and grey.

It was locked.

I almost turned back. I almost told myself this was enough for one night, that I should return to bed and let the morning bring clearer thinking. But then I remembered dying without ever asking a single hard question, and the memory hardened something in me that refused to walk away twice.

I found the key on my third try, hidden exactly where a woman hiding things from a controlling husband might hide them behind a loose stone in the corridor wall, cold and rough beneath my fingers. Whoever left that photograph had left this too. Someone in this house was still trying to tell the truth, even if they were too frightened to say it out loud.

The door groaned open onto a narrow staircase, air rushing up cool and stale, smelling faintly of dust and something underneath it I didn't want to name yet. I descended slowly, one hand trailing the wall, my phone light throwing long shadows across old stone steps that hadn't been swept in years.

At the bottom was a room with no windows.

Just as the note promised.

It wasn't a torture chamber, wasn't anything so dramatic as my racing heart had half-expected. It was almost worse for how ordinary it looked: a narrow bed, a small desk, a chair. A woman's things, still arranged as if she might return any moment to sit down and finish whatever she'd been writing. A cardigan draped over the chair back. A hairbrush with strands of dark hair still caught in the bristles.

My stomach turned.

On the desk sat a stack of letters, yellowed at the edges, tied with a ribbon gone brittle with age. I untied them with shaking hands and unfolded the top one, angling my phone light across handwriting I now recognized from the photograph's inscription the same anxious, hurried script.

“If you're reading this, I'm already gone. He told everyone I left. I didn't leave. I've never once been allowed to leave.”

I pressed a hand to my mouth to keep the sound trapped inside my throat.

“He keeps me here when I ask too many questions. He says it's for my own protection, that people out there want to hurt the Voss family through me. I used to believe him. I don't anymore. I don't think I'm the first wife he's said that to, and I'm terrified I won't be the last.”

The letter ended there, the final line trailing off mid-sentence, ink smeared like the pen had been pulled away too fast.

I heard a sound behind me, the soft, unmistakable creak of the staircase.

I spun around, phone light swinging wildly across the stone walls, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my throat.

A figure stood at the bottom of the stairs, backlit by the corridor light above, face lost in shadow.

"You found the room," the voice said quietly, familiar, threaded through with something that might have been relief or might have been dread. "I wondered how long it would take."

The figure stepped forward into the light, and I finally saw her face clearly for the first time.

It wasn't Ines.

It was a woman I had never seen before in my life — and yet, staring at her features, the shape of her eyes, the set of her jaw, I understood with a cold, sinking certainty exactly who she had to be.

She looked exactly like the woman in the photograph.

She looked exactly like Marisol.