Chapter 2 - The Locked DrawerBy the third week, the rhythm of the afternoons had become my anchor. I knew the exact temperature Ernest liked his tea (steeped for precisely four minutes) and which pages of the daily paper he preferred to skip. In return, he taught me how to listen—not just to words, but to the pauses between them.
One Tuesday, while searching for a spare fountain pen in his mahogany desk, my hand brushed against a small, velvet-lined compartment hidden beneath the bottom drawer. It was locked.
"Looking for something, Laura?"
I jumped, dropping a box of paper clips. Ernest was standing in the doorway, his cane tapping rhythmically against the Persian rug. He didn't look angry; his expression was unreadable, shadowed by the late-afternoon sun cutting through the bay window.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Walker," I stammered, straightening up. "The drawer was stuck. I was just looking for ink."
He walked slowly toward the desk, each step deliberate. He didn't say a word until he stood right beside me. Reaching into his waistcoat pocket, he pulled out a small, tarnished brass key on a worn leather cord.
"That drawer doesn't hold ink," he said quietly, inserting the key into the hidden lock. The mechanism clicked with a heavy, satisfying sound. "It holds the reason I built this house... and the reason I've stayed inside it for twelve years."
He pulled out a thick, leather-bound journal with yellowed pages and cracked spine. On the cover, written in elegant, faded cursive, was a name I had never heard him mention: Clara.
"Open it," Ernest murmured, pushing the book toward me. "And tell me if you recognize the woman on page forty-two."
With trembling fingers, I lifted the cover. The page fell open to a charcoal sketch of a young woman standing on a suspension bridge, wind blowing through her hair. Her face—her sharp cheekbones, her intense, questioning eyes—was an exact mirror of the reflection I looked at every morning in my bathroom mirror.
I gasped, dropping the book back onto the desk. "Who... who is this?"
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Ernest smiled, a sad, distant ghost of a grin. "My wife, Clara. And the day I drew this, she looked at me with the exact same terrified, exhausted expression you wear every time you walk through my front gate."
Hook for Facebook: She opened a locked desk drawer in the old man's study and found a drawing of a woman who looked identical to her—drawn fifty years before she was even born.
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