I look up at her perfectly made-up face, and for a moment, I see a flash of real fear. Why doesn’t Suzette want me to call the police?

Enzo is standing by the stairwell, frozen, as he stares at the wallpaper, his eyes narrowing. He is looking below the stairwell, although I can’t tell what has caught his attention. I shake off Suzette’s grip and join him. That’s when I see it.

There is a crack in the wallpaper.

No, it’s more than a crack. The wallpaper has been completely ripped in a straight line. And the pattern of the tear in the paper is the exact shape of a small door, the top of which comes up to Enzo’s shoulder. We usually keep a large house plant in that exact spot, but it’s been shifted over to reveal the outline of the doorway.

“Che diavolo?” he mutters.

He reaches out and pushes against the defect in the wall. To our surprise, the wall shifts and starts to push open. It takes him some amount of effort, and a terrible scraping sound fills the room.

And that’s when it hits me.

“Oh my God!” I cry. “That’s it! That’s the scraping noise I’ve been hearing!”

I wasn’t imagining that scraping sound haunting me during the night. That was real. That was coming from my own home. From this hidden door opening and closing.

Except who was inside my house, opening and closing this door while the rest of us slept?

TWENTY-TWO

I grab Enzo’s arm before he can wrench open the door. As much as I want to find the kids, I’m suddenly terrified of what’s behind that door.

“Please be careful,” I beg him.

He glances at me for a second, acknowledging my warning. Then he pushes the door the rest of the way open.

It’s a small room, not too much bigger than a closet. There are no windows, giving the room a stiflingly claustrophobic feel. I stare into the small space, dimly lit by a single flickering bulb.

And in the corner of the room are Ada and Nico, crouched on the floor, staring up at us.

“Ada! Nico!” My eyes fill with tears of relief. “What are you guys doing in here? How did you find this room? Your father and I were worried sick!”

The kids scramble to their feet, wearing identical guilty expressions. I’m not even sure which one of them to hug first, but Enzo hugs Ada, so I go for Nico. He stiffens at first, but then he buries his face in my chest. As I cling to him, I take a better look around the small room. It’s about half the size of either of the kids’ bedrooms, and it’s extremely dusty, like nobody has been in here for years. I’m surprised the light still works. In one corner of the room, there’s a little pile of rusty nails. In another corner, there’s a small stack of Nico’s comic books.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Nico says. “I found this clubhouse to play in. I didn’t know it wasn’t allowed.”

Only my son would rip through the new wallpaper of our house to find some dirty, disgusting room filled with tetanus-riddled nails and then make it his clubhouse. And apparently, he’s been sneaking down here several nights a week to do this, based on how often I’ve been hearing that scraping sound, which nearly gave me a heart attack several times over.

“We were calling your names!” I say. “Didn’t you hear us?”

Ada pulls away from Enzo, wiping her eyes. She is crying hard now. And when I touch my own face, I realize that I’m crying too. “We didn’t hear anything!” Ada sobs.

Suzette has stepped into the tiny room, and she is examining the door. “It looks like there’s a very thick layer of insulation here. It would’ve been hard for them to hear anything.”

“We didn’t hear a thing,” Nico confirms.

Suzette is looking all around the room, like she’s appraising it for when the house goes back on the market when we inevitably can’t afford the mortgage. “I had no idea this little room even existed in this house. They must have wallpapered over it when they were renovating.” She lifts her eyes to look at the ceiling. “Maybe they felt it wasn’t stable.”

I flash the children a stern look. “I cannot believe you’ve been hiding in some mystery room in the house that doesn’t even have a stable ceiling.”

“I’m sorry,” Ada sniffles.

Nico doesn’t apologize again, but he drops his eyes.

“All right.” My heart rate seems to have decelerated to something normal. And my blood pressure… Well, I’m sure it’s still high because it always is. But at least I don’t quite feel like I’m about to have a stroke anymore. “Let’s all leave this dangerous room under the staircase, please.”

I evacuate the kids out of the room first, then Enzo goes, ducking down to avoid hitting the frame of the door, and I follow. Suzette lingers behind, looking around the tiny space. I swear to God, if she suggests we turn this room into some sort of playroom or something else along those lines, I might smack her. I do not like enclosed spaces like this. I had a bad experience that I’m not sure I’ll ever entirely get over.

“I’m sorry,” Ada says again as she wipes her eyes. “We won’t ever go in there again. I promise.”

She looks really upset. Ada takes everything so hard. “I know you won’t, sweetie.”

Ada is still crying, gulping to try to get it under control. But here’s the weird part: When we came into the room, her eyes looked red and swollen. Like she’d already been crying when we busted into the room.

But why would Ada have been crying?

TWENTY-THREE

After the scare this evening, Enzo won’t leave the kids alone for a millisecond. He spends two hours playing baseball in the backyard with Nico, and he even convinces Ada to play the catcher. By bedtime, both of them are worn out, but Enzo seems to have tons of energy as he strips off his T-shirt and work pants.

“Did you check your blood pressure tonight?” he asks me.

You know what? I am getting super sick of him fretting over my blood pressure. “Yes,” I lie.

I checked it this morning. After all the excitement this evening, I don’t even want to know what it is now. I got the full work up my doctor recommended, and everything was negative. I’m just unlucky/defective.

“Did you try meditating?” he asks me.

He looked up a bunch of relaxation techniques that are supposed to lower blood pressure, and then he printed out a bunch of articles. Meditation topped the list, so he bought me a book about it, which is now collecting dust in one of our bookcases.

“Did you try meditation?” I shoot back. “It’s so boring.”

He laughs. “Okay, so we do together?”

“Maybe some other time.”

“Okay. How about massage?”

I laugh at the way he wags his eyebrows. Enzo gives very good massages. If he’s up for it, it’s tempting, but I am so tired. And a massage is never just a massage. Not with him.

“Maybe later,” I say.

He climbs into bed beside me and gets under the sheets. “I can’t believe we have an extra room we didn’t even know about,” he muses.

“That’s not an extra room. That is a hazard.”

“Maybe it is not safe right now, no,” he says. “But I bet with a little work, we could make it up to code.”