The electrician had been talking all morning while he worked — about the weather, my kids, even the Steelers. I’d hired him to run a new line for a ceiling fan, and everything had been completely normal until he climbed halfway up the attic ladder and suddenly stopped in the middle of a sentence. He stood there without moving for about fifteen seconds.
I called his name twice from the bottom of the ladder. He slowly started coming back down, facing me the entire time, the way you do when you don’t want to turn your back on something. Then he asked whether anyone had been in the attic recently. I told him no. Nobody had been up there since my husband died in 2019.
He looked at me for a long moment and asked if I was absolutely sure. I told him my husband had always handled the attic, and after he died I had never had a reason to go up there. The electrician wouldn’t tell me what he’d seen at first. He just asked me to stay downstairs while he called his supervisor.
When he finally explained, he said he’d noticed something near the far end of the attic that looked like it had been moved recently. There were fresh marks in the dust, and something appeared to have been placed behind an old storage box. I asked if he could simply bring it down, but he said he didn’t want to touch it until I knew what it was.
Then he showed me a photograph he’d taken from the ladder. Behind the box was an old wooden trunk I’d never seen before. And sitting on top of it was an envelope with my husband’s handwriting on the front — dated three months after his death…
