I stood in the doorway for a long time because nothing about the apartment looked abandoned. There were fresh flowers, groceries in the kitchen, and photographs on the walls that I had never seen before. On the refrigerator was a calendar with several dates circled, including one from the following week.
I called the landlord and asked who had been staying there, expecting him to say he didn’t know. Instead, he told me my mother had always been very specific about who could enter and that someone had been checking the apartment every Sunday for years. Then he said something that made me look at the photographs again: “I assumed you were the daughter she was protecting.”
I asked him what he meant, and he went quiet before telling me about the person who had been receiving the keys. I searched the apartment for anything with a name on it and found an envelope hidden behind a drawer. Inside was a letter from my mother dated 1998, and the first sentence explained why she had kept the apartment secret for twenty-six years…
