When I pulled the handle, the whole section lifted more easily than it should have. There was a narrow set of wooden steps going down into a space beneath the porch, and the first thing I noticed was that the dust had been disturbed recently. My father had been gone since March, and nobody had mentioned anything about a room under there.
I climbed down with a flashlight. It wasn’t a storage space. There was a small chair, an old workbench, and a battery-powered lamp that still worked. On the wall were marks showing different heights and dates, the way parents mark their children’s growth. I recognized my own handwriting from when I was a kid, but there were other names underneath mine that I didn’t recognize.
Then I found a metal box on the workbench. It wasn’t locked. Inside were envelopes, each one labeled with a year, and every envelope had the same instruction written across it: “Do not give this to him unless he asks about the porch.” I was standing there trying to understand what that meant when I heard something upstairs.
Someone had stepped onto the porch.
I froze and turned off the light. I heard the floorboards creak twice, then someone tried the handle I’d just pulled. They knew exactly where the hidden door was. And then a voice came through the boards — a voice I hadn’t heard in years — and the person said my name…
