I set my drill down real slow, because the hole opened into the wall behind that bolted mirror was not empty. There was a small steel safe set into the studs, and the door was unlocked, and inside were letters.
Hundreds of them. War letters, from the 1940s, between a soldier overseas and a young woman at home, tied in ribbon by year. And a small ring box with a modest engagement ring in it. And a deed to the house, in the womans name alone.
The story came clear as I read. The young woman lived in this house with a father who did not approve of the soldier she loved, a man who would have burned the letters and sold the ring if he ever found them. So she cut a hole in the wall, hung a heavy mirror over it, and hid her whole love story behind the one thing her father walked past every day without a second glance.
She married her soldier when he came home. They lived in this house sixty years. And she never took the letters out of the wall, because by then the hiding place was part of the love story too.
Her father hung a mirror in the hall so he could check his tie. His daughter used it to hide the only thing in that house he could not control.
The couple who hired me found the soldier and his bride had both passed, and traced their granddaughter, who lived up in Pittsburgh and had grown up hearing that her grandparents letters were lost in a move decades ago.
They were not lost. They were behind the mirror the whole time. We put them in the granddaughters hands, sixty years of a love that outlasted a disapproving father, and the ring, and the deed.
She read one letter out loud, from 1944, and could not get through it, and none of us minded. She had the letters bound into a book for her whole family.
I hung the new glass in that hall. But the couple asked me to leave the little safe in the wall behind it, empty now, because some hiding places keep love safe long after the ones who built them are gone.