6. Nora
— ? —
Nora
“I need you to box up the items in the attic.” Brielle delivers this order over her morning coffee, not bothering to look up from her phone. Her nails tap against the screen in a rhythm that sets my teeth on edge. “My husband’s first wife’s things. It’s been two years. They’re taking up space.”
I set down the breakfast tray carefully, using the motion to hide the way my hands want to shake. The porcelain rattles anyway - just slightly, just enough that I have to press my palms flat against the wood to steady myself.
“Of course, Mrs. Walker.” My voice comes out perfectly neutral. I’ve practiced this voice. I’ve perfected it. “Where would you like them sent?”
“Goodwill, I suppose. Or the garbage. Whichever.” She waves a dismissive hand, her diamond ring catching the morning light and throwing small rainbows across the ceiling.
The ring Adrian gave her. The ring she wears in the house I decorated, at the table I chose, in the life I built.
“The point is, I want them gone. This is my house now.”
This was my house first, I want to scream.
My furniture. My garden. My life. My daughter sleeping down the hall in the nursery I painted with my own hands, the yellow walls I chose because I read that yellow stimulates infant brain development, the curtains I sewed myself because store-bought ones weren’t soft enough.
“I’ll take care of it this afternoon.”
Brielle finally looks up, and for a moment suspicion crosses her face and is gone - or maybe curiosity. I keep my expression blank. Servile. The face of a woman who has no stake in any of this.
“See that you do.” She returns to her phone. “And don’t take all day about it. I need the silver polished before the dinner party.”
“Yes, Mrs. Walker.”
I leave the room before my mask can crack.
The attic stairs creak under my feet, a sound I remember from the countless times I climbed them before. The third step groans. The seventh has a loose nail that catches on your shoe if you’re not careful. The handrail wobbles on the left side because Adrian always said he’d fix it and never did.
Adrian always hated the attic - too dusty, too cramped, too full of things he’d rather forget.
But I loved it. I used to come up here when I needed to think, when I needed to breathe, when I needed to be somewhere that felt like mine and mine alone.
I’d curl up by the small window and watch the sunset paint the sky in colors I couldn’t name, and I’d feel - for just a moment - like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Now I’m climbing these stairs as a stranger. As a servant. As a ghost haunting her own life.
The boxes are stacked against the far wall, covered in a thin layer of dust that speaks to how thoroughly Brielle has forgotten they exist. Two years of accumulation, soft and gray and undisturbed. I run my finger through it, leaving a clean trail, and something in my chest twists at the sight.
I recognize them all. The box labeled BOOKS in my handwriting, that careful print I developed in college because my cursive was illegible.
The garment bag with my wedding dress, the plastic yellowed now, the zipper slightly rusted.
The photo albums I spent months organizing after Lily was born, arranging and rearranging until every picture told the story I wanted to remember.
I open the first box.
My books. The novels I read in college, margins covered in my handwriting: notes and questions and exclamation points, the evidence of a younger mind engaging with ideas that felt urgent then.
The cookbook my mother gave me when I got married, its spine cracked from use, splattered with sauce stains and flour fingerprints that I never bothered to clean because they felt like proof of a life well-lived.
The wedding dress is next. I pull it from the garment bag slowly, carefully, letting the silk spill over my hands like water.
Like memory. The fabric is cool against my skin, and it still smells faintly of the lavender sachets I used to keep in my closet, a smell that doubles me over right there on the attic floor, both arms wrapping around the dress and everything I’ve lost inside it.
I remember the day I bought it. The boutique with the champagne and the mirrors and the saleswoman who cried when I walked out in this dress, who said she’d been doing this for twenty years and had never seen a bride look so happy.
Adrian said I looked like something from a dream.
Theo said I looked like the woman he’d been waiting his whole life to see.
I didn’t understand what he meant then. I thought it was just Theo being Theo: too earnest, too intense, always saying things that landed slightly wrong. I laughed it off. Changed the subject. Married his best friend three months later and never let myself wonder what his words really meant.
I think I do now.
The photo albums are the worst. I pull them out one by one, stacking them on the dusty floor, and then I sit cross-legged in front of them like a supplicant at an altar and I make myself look.
Picture after picture of my old face, my old life, my old happiness.
Lily’s birth - red and screaming and perfect, placed on my chest while I sobbed with a joy I didn’t know humans were capable of feeling.
Her first steps, wobbling across the living room with her arms outstretched, falling into my hands like she knew I’d always catch her.
Her first birthday, face covered in cake, laughing with her whole body. Second birthday. Third.
My face in every frame. My smile in every moment. Evidence of a woman who existed, who mattered, who was here.
And then, nothing.
The albums stop. The final page is Lily at three and a half, sitting on my lap at the park, both of us squinting into the sun.
I remember that day. Adrian took the picture.
We got ice cream afterward, and Lily dropped hers in the parking lot, and I gave her mine without thinking because that’s what mothers do - they give and give and give until there’s nothing left.
The night of her fourth birthday, I went into a river. Before her fifth, Brielle was sleeping in my bed.
I hear footsteps on the stairs.
Small footsteps. Cautious. The careful tread of a child who has learned to move quietly, who has learned that being noticed isn’t always safe.
I shove the photo album back into the box and turn around just as Lily’s head appears at the top of the stairs.
Her dark hair is tangled - Brielle doesn’t brush it the way I used to, with patience, with detangling spray and gentle fingers - and there’s a smear of something on her cheek. Jam, maybe. Or chocolate.
“Are you supposed to be up here?” I ask, keeping my voice gentle.
She shakes her head, and guilt moves through her face, there and gone - or maybe fear. “Mom Brielle is on the phone. She won’t notice.”
The way she says it breaks something in me. She won’t notice. Like invisibility is a survival skill this child has mastered. Like being overlooked is the safest thing she knows how to be.
She comes the rest of the way up, looking around the attic with wide eyes that hold too much knowledge for a five-year-old. She’s been here before. I can see it in the way she navigates the boxes without hesitation, the familiar path she takes to the corner where a small window lets in dusty light.
“I like it up here,” she says quietly. Her voice is almost a whisper, like she’s sharing a secret. “No one ever comes up here.”
“What do you do when you visit?”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she crouches down by the baseboard and pries up a loose floorboard with practiced ease. She’s done this before, many times, her small fingers finding the groove without looking.
Inside is a scarf.
My scarf. The green silk one my mother gave me on my wedding day, pressed into my hands with tears in her eyes and words about new beginnings. The one I thought I’d lost years ago, the one I mourned almost as much as I mourned the life it represented.
Lily pulls it out carefully, reverently, like she’s handling something holy. She holds it to her face, pressing the silk against her nose and mouth, and closes her eyes.
“I smell it when I miss her,” she whispers. “My real mommy. Don’t tell Mom Brielle. She threw the rest away.”
Words won’t come. Everything I might say has jammed somewhere between my heart and my teeth. My daughter is sitting in my attic, holding my mother’s scarf, telling me she hides it from the woman who stole her from me.
“Can you smell it?” Lily holds the scarf out to me, her eyes huge and hopeful. “It smells like flowers. Like she used to smell.”
I take the scarf with hands that won’t stop shaking.
The silk is soft against my fingers, familiar in a way that makes my chest ache.
The perfume is faded now, two years of being hidden under a floorboard, two years of a little girl pressing it to her face and breathing in the ghost of her mother, but I can still catch traces of it.
My mother’s garden. The roses I used to tend. The life I used to have.
“It’s beautiful,” I manage. The words come out thick, unsteady.
“You can’t tell.” Lily’s face goes fierce, her jaw setting in a way that’s pure Adrian: stubborn, immovable, ready to fight. “Promise you won’t tell. She’ll take it away. She takes everything away.”
“I promise.”
Lily relaxes slightly, her shoulders dropping from where they’d climbed toward her ears. Then she looks at me with those dark eyes, Adrian’s eyes, with my mother’s steadiness looking out of them, that see too much for a five-year-old.
“You’re nice to me,” she says, and there’s wonder in her voice, like kindness is something rare and strange. “Nobody else is nice to me. Except Uncle Theo, but he’s not here very much.”
“I’ll always be nice to you.” The words come out before I can stop them, a promise I have no right to make, a vow that could destroy everything I’m working toward.