I got down flat and reached in and pulled it up through the hole, and I set my drill on the subfloor real slow, because what somebody had hidden under that floor was not money or valuables at all. It was a mother love, sealed away for a child she was never allowed to keep.
It was a small trunk, and inside were baby clothes folded soft with age, a lock of fine hair tied with thread, and a thick bundle of letters, dozens of them, all in the same careful hand, all addressed to a daughter by a name.
The letters told a story that broke my heart there on my knees. A young woman in that house, decades back, had been made to give up her baby girl, the way girls were made to in those years. And she had spent the rest of her life writing to that child she was not allowed to raise. One letter for every birthday. One for every Christmas. Years of them, telling the daughter she never got to hold that she was loved every single day, that giving her up was not the same as not wanting her.
She could not send them. She did not know where her child had gone. So she sealed them under the floor of the house, the letters and the little clothes and the lock of hair, praying, she wrote, that someday somehow they would reach her girl.
The couple who hired me had a daughter of their own, and they could not let it lie any more than I could. Between the name in the letters and the records that get opened these days, we found her. The daughter was a grown woman now, older than the mother in those letters had been, and she had spent her whole life believing her birth mother had simply not wanted her.
We put the letters in her hands. She read a lifetime of a mother love, birthday by birthday, and she learned the truth she had ached for without knowing it. She had been wanted. She had been loved every day of a life she thought had forgotten her.
A mother wrote to her lost child for a lifetime and sealed it under a floor, praying love would find a way, and after all those years it did. The birth mother had passed on, so the daughter never got to say the words back to her. But she read every letter, and she keeps them now, and she told me she finally feels like somebody in this world chose her. Twenty years I have laid floors. That is the only one that ever carried a mother heart across the years to the child she never stopped loving.