She found one room where the floor didn’t sag too much, and that’s where they laid out their sleeping bags. That night, the wind pushed against the cracked walls, whistling through unseen gaps. Somewhere in the house, something scurried in the ceiling.
Days blurred into a slow rhythm, Naomi scrubbing mold from the kitchen tiles, patching a window with cardboard, hanging blankets to keep out the draft. She took cleaning jobs in town, coming home with sore hands and just enough groceries for the week. The neighbors barely looked her way.
The in-laws didn’t call. The mansion stood in silence, as if waiting for her to break. But every night, before she closed her eyes, Naomi stared up at the cracked ceiling and told herself the same thing.
She wasn’t leaving. Not yet. It happened on a Sunday afternoon.
The rain had finally stopped, leaving the house damp and colder than usual. Naomi was in the kitchen, scrubbing rust from an old pot, when she heard Jordan’s voice echo from above. Mom, you need to see this.
She climbed the narrow attic stairs, each step creaking like it might give way. The air up there was thick with dust, swirling in the thin shafts of light that leaked through broken tiles. Jordan was crouched near one of the beams, running his finger along the wood, etched into it.
Faint but deliberate were rows of numbers and symbols. Some looked like coordinates, others like strange shorthand. Naomi crouched beside him, tracing the grooves with her own hand.
The markings were too neat to be random, too deliberate to be just some bored kid’s graffiti. Her husband had once told her stories about his family’s shipping business, how they moved goods up and down the coast in the early 1900s, how certain records were always kept off the books. She remembered the look in his eyes when he said it, half pride, half something else.
She took a quick photo on her phone, the kind you don’t really know why you’re taking until later. That night, lying in the dark with Maya curled against her, the image wouldn’t leave her mind. Why hide something in the attic? And why use codes instead of plain words? The next day, Naomi began looking at the house differently, not just as a burden, but as something holding secrets.
Still, she wasn’t ready to believe there was anything worth finding. Not yet. The codes gnawed at her for days…
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