I leaned over my son’s bed and pulled the blanket up under his chin.
Noah was five, all soft hair and sleepy eyes and the kind of trust that could break your heart if you looked at it too long. He smelled like shampoo and little-boy sweat and the strawberry toothpaste he never managed to rinse completely off his lips. He held his stuffed dinosaur under one arm and blinked up at me.Goodnight, buddy,” I whispered, brushing his forehead with my lips.
I had one knee on the rug and one hand on the mattress, ready to stand and turn off the hallway light.
Then his hand shot out and caught my sleeve.
“Mom?”
Something in his voice made me stop. It was quiet, but not sleepy. Cautious. Like he was weighing whether he should tell me something.
“Yes?”
His eyes didn’t stay on me. They slid instead toward the dark space under the bed.
“Why does Auntie crawl out from there every time you go on a business trip?”
For a moment, I truly believed I had misheard him. My brain rejected the sentence before it could even make sense of it. I stared at him, waiting for him to laugh or correct himself or say something that made it normal.
“What did you say?”
He pointed, small finger trembling toward the floor.
“Auntie,” he whispered again. “Daddy’s sister. She comes out from under the bed when you’re gone.”
The room seemed to sharpen around me. The edges of the dresser. The shape of the closet door. The dim blue glow of the nightlight. My heartbeat kicked hard against my ribs, sudden and loud, as if I had started running without meaning to.
Eric’s sister, Melissa, lived twenty minutes away in an apartment near Mission Valley. She came by for birthdays, sometimes on Sundays, sometimes for dinner when Eric invited her over and forgot to mention it until she was already on her way. I liked her well enough in the way people like family members they don’t fully trust but haven’t yet caught doing anything unforgivable.
But under my son’s bed?
When I was out of town?
I lowered myself slowly until I was kneeling beside Noah again.
“When did you see that, sweetheart?”
He shrugged in the absent, careless way children do when they have no idea they’re holding a live grenade.
“A lot.”
My mouth went dry. “Did Daddy know she was there?”
