I couldn’t stop reading.
There were seven more letters in the box. Every single one got worse.
My aunt kept begging my mom to leave him. She wrote about screaming matches behind locked doors, broken dishes in the middle of the night, and bruises my mom always covered with makeup before church.
But the last letter changed everything.
It was never about my dad hurting my mom.
It was about what they were doing together.
My aunt wrote that people in town had started disappearing back in 2005. A cashier from the grocery store. A teenage boy who delivered newspapers. Even a teacher from the elementary school.
She said my parents always acted strangely after each disappearance.
Then I found a folded newspaper clipping hidden inside the envelope.
The article showed a photo of a burned cabin deep in the woods behind our old property.
Police believed it had been abandoned for years.
But scribbled across the top in my mother’s handwriting were four words:
“HE KNOWS ABOUT THE BASEMENT.”
That’s when I heard footsteps upstairs.
Slow.
Heavy.
And impossible.
Because my dad disappeared eleven years ago.
