“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.”
“We are not doing that, Enzo.”
“Why not?”
I throw up my hands. “You seriously need to ask me that question? You know how I feel about tiny enclosed spaces.”
He knows. He knows everything I’ve been through in the past and how I’ve been locked in a place like that, which I could not escape. Something like that gives you permanent claustrophobia.
This would be a good time for him to drop it, especially if he’s worried about my blood pressure. But for reasons I don’t understand, he doesn’t shut up.
“We could fix it up,” he insists. “Suzette says that—”
“Oh? What does Suzette say? Please tell me everything Suzette thinks.”
He presses his lips together. “You know she is a real estate agent. This is what she does. She is offering her expertise.”
“You know,” I say, “maybe you would make more money if you spent more time working and less time in her yard.”
“I am only in her yard a little bit.”
