I lifted it out onto the dry tile and set my bar down real slow, because what was sealed under that pool deck was not a dark secret at all. It was a message of pure happiness, left behind by children for whoever came next, and the family who found it needed it more than they knew.
It was a sealed box, wrapped against the wet, and inside were a childs crayon drawings, a few small toys gone soft with age, a faded photograph of a whole family laughing around that very pool on a summer day, and a letter, written in the round careful hand of a kid who could not have been more than ten years old.
The letter said that they had been so happy in this house. That they swam in this pool every single summer and had cookouts and caught fireflies in the yard until dark, and that they were sad, so sad, to have to move away from the only home they had ever loved.
And it said, to whoever found this someday, that they hoped the new family would be as happy here as they had been, and that this was a good house for being happy in.
The family who hired me stood around that little box and got very quiet. Because they had bought this house after a hard, sad year, a loss they were still climbing out of, and they had been living in it like guests, unable to feel at home, unable to feel much of anything. The wife told me, tears in her eyes, that they had wondered if they would ever be happy again, let alone in this house full of a stranger echoes.
And here was a child, from years before, reaching out of the ground to give them permission. This is a good house for being happy in. Be as happy here as we were.
Something lifted off that family right there on the pool deck. It was as if the house itself, through a childs hand, had told them it was all right to live again, all right to laugh in these rooms, all right to make it their own.
A child sealed a wish for the next family under the pool deck, and years later it reached exactly the grieving family that needed to hear it. They kept that letter, framed it, hung it by the pool. Their own kids swim there now, and there are cookouts again, and I am told there is laughing in that house for the first time since they moved in. Twenty six years I have worked around pools. That is the only slab I ever lifted that had a blessing sealed underneath it.