I Married a Billionaire: Lost and Found(56)

"Oh no. Absolutely not," I called after him, struggling to get to my feet. "No way are you going out like this."

"I'll take a cab," he said.

I squeezed my eyes shut, tightly.

"Fine," I said.

When I opened them, he was already gone.

***

I made a valiant effort to go to sleep after he left, but I couldn’t. After tossing and turning in bed for a while, I flicked the light on again and started thumbing through books without even looking at the covers - or the words, if I was being completely honest with myself.

Eventually, I came to terms with the fact that I couldn’t possibly focus. I got up and wandered back to the bookshelf, returning everything one by one.

As I did, my eyes drifted over to the closet. Not Daniels’ clothes closet - THE closet. He almost always kept the doors closed, and for some reason, I had never ventured to open it myself. He’d never explicitly told me not to. I just didn’t, as if it were some kind of inner sacrament that I wasn’t allowed to touch.

For some reason, in that moment, I realized that was ridiculous. It was as much my closet as it was his. I had every right to go in there, if I wanted to.

My heart was pounding as I approached the door. Even though I knew I’d be able to hear the front door open well before he could get upstairs, I was still taken with the ridiculous fear that I’d turn around and see him standing behind me, his arms crossed, and his eyes dark with anger.

I slid the door open, slowly. The sound of the runners scraping against the track was deafening in the silent room.

I’d caught glimpses of this side before, when he opened it in front of me. I knew that there were a few small floggers and whips hanging along the back wall, and several lengths of rope looped over the bar that was meant for hanging clothes. On the floor, there was a large black duffel bag that I’d never seen unzipped. I grabbed it by the handles and dragged it forward, with the intention of finally peeking inside, after all this time.

And then, I saw something that derailed me completely.

At first I thought it might just be a shadow, but leaning down further I could see there was definitely something on the wall - an outline of a square, almost like…

I reached out and touched it. I almost jumped out of my skin when that little portion of the wall popped open, displaying a small cubby in the wall. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find there - a safe, or some kind of strongbox. But instead, there was a small shoebox, slightly tattered around the edges.

I reached in and removed it, gently. Sitting down on the bed with it on my lap, I slipped my fingertips under the lid and raised it. As I did, a fleeting thought passed through my head - the box was too small to have ever held an adult’s shoes. He must have been holding onto it since he was a child.

Inside was a mess of papers, photographs, and tiny objects, disorganized in a way that ran counter to everything I knew about Daniel. I heard something rolling around in the bottom. A marble? I could see the corner of an old photograph peeking out from behind some folded papers, so I pulled them out and set them aside.

It wasn’t just one photograph, I realized, but a whole stack of Polaroids, beginning to peel and yellow around the edges, the chemicals starting to seep back into the photographs and distort the edges into a strange kaleidoscope of colors. The first in the stack was a classic. A little boy was sitting in his high chair, holding a handful of spaghetti noodles, with sauce smeared all over his face. The decor of the kitchen was distinctly late ‘80s. I flipped the picture over. Someone had written on it in a long, elegant hand - in pencil, so it was all but unreadable now - Danny, Aug ’86.

In the next picture, he was older, and a sandy-haired girl who must be Lindsey was there too. She’d just begun to reach that gangly stage of ten or eleven, and crouched between them, with her arms wrapped tightly around them both, was a woman who could only be Daniel’s mother.

Although she was obviously posing, she also looked to have been taken by surprise, mid-sentence, but still smiling. Lindsey looked like she was trying to smile, but the sun was in her face. Daniel was scowling.

I flipped through each picture, one by one. It was everything one would expect from a stack of family photos. The last one was taken in the midday sunlight, featuring Daniel’s mother sitting on the side of the pool, dangling her legs in the water. Daniel and Lindsey were swimming and splashing nearby, almost out of frame. I looked a little closer. Daniel’s mother was smiling, but that sort of faint, tired smile that you can only just manage when you’re sick. Her bikini almost looked baggy around her in certain places. And in spite of the bright sun, her skin was as pale as anything.

I shivered, and went to slide the picture back into the bottom of the box. As I did, my fingers brushed against something that felt…sharp, almost, yet delicate. Frowning, I lifted up the rest of the box’s contents and fished for the object.

As my fingers closed around it, I realized what it was. But I didn’t quite process it until I lifted it up and opened my hand, looking down at the little shell sitting in my palm. A tiny nautilus shell, as beautiful and delicate as it was the day I found it.

For some reason, as my heart twisted and my throat tightened, all I could think to do was pick up the pile of folded papers that I’d removed from the top of the box. The first one looked oddly fresh - cleanly folded. New.

I opened it.