When Celia’s husband refuses to let her open the trunk of their shared car, she senses that something isn’t right. What begins as mild suspicion quickly unravels into a late-night discovery she can’t forget. But the truth behind the locked trunk isn’t at all what she expected…
and it changes everything. There are certain moments in a marriage when the ground doesn’t crack beneath you, but you swear it shifts. Quietly. Just enough for you to notice.
It was a Tuesday. Ordinary in every way possible. Milan had soccer practice, Madison wouldn’t eat her sandwich unless I cut it into a heart, and I still had two deadlines by 15:30.
I was wired on cold coffee and the sound of the laundry tumbling behind me when I asked Adam to come pick me up from my mom’s. Our internet had been down for a few days and I had no choice but to work from my mom’s while she kept Madison entertained with finger painting. We’d bought the car six months earlier.
It was a practical little sedan that smelled like new plastic and possibility. I used it for groceries, school runs, trips to the paediatrician and sometimes for a sneaky drive to a beautiful cliffside, just to breathe. Adam used it for work, because apparently being an accountant meant emergency meetings and missed trains.
When he pulled into my mom’s driveway, I waved from the porch and turned with the box in my hands. It was a big one. My mom’s latest batch of pickles, chutneys, jams, and two loaves of freshly baked bread…
all the things that taste like my childhood. “Can you pop the trunk?” I asked, adjusting the box against my hip. Adam didn’t move.
“Just toss it in the back seat,” he said too quickly. “Madison is tiny, she’ll fit with it.”
“Why?” I blinked slowly. “The trunk’s empty, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he said, scratching the back of his neck.
“But it’s really… dirty, Celia. Cement or something, you know?
I meant to clean it out but we’ve been so busy with that audit lately. You’ve seen how long my days have become.”
“Cement?” I asked, confusion settling between my eyebrows. “From your office job?”
He looked up at me with that easy smile, the one that had charmed me 11 years ago in a bookstore and shrugged.
“It’s a long story, Lia. I’ll explain later. Grab Maddie and let’s go home, I’m starving.
I’m thinking of lasagne for dinner.”
Only, he didn’t explain a damn thing.
Still, I didn’t think about it too much. Life didn’t give me room to, not with Milan losing a tooth at soccer and Madison refusing to nap. But by Saturday, I needed the car.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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