She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The room smelled like old paper and dust, with a faint undertone of something else, leather, perhaps, or the ghost of the cologne Daniel had worn. His desk dominated the space, a massive oak piece that he had inherited from his father.Bookshelves lined two walls, filled with volumes on business and history and biography, the kinds of books that looked impressive but that Maggie had never seen him actually read.
Everything was exactly as he had left it. Christopher and Becca had used the house, but they had never touched this room. No one had. It was as if Daniel's presence still lingered here, guarding his territory even from beyond the grave.
Maggie heard footsteps in the hallway and turned to see Michael standing in the doorway. Her oldest son looked older than his years in this light. He had been quieter than usual all day, moving through the house with a heaviness that the others didn't seem to carry.
“I thought I'd find you here,” he said.
“I've been avoiding it.”
“I know. So have I.” He stepped into the room, his eyes moving across the shelves, the desk, the leather chair where their father had sat for so many hours. “It still smells like him.”
“I noticed.”
Michael moved to the bookshelf and ran his finger along the spines of the books, leaving a trail in the dust. “I used to stand outside this door when I was a kid, trying to work up the courage to knock. I always had questions, about homework, about baseball, about life. But I could never bring myself to disturb him.”
“He wasn't easy to approach.”
“No. He wasn't.” Michael pulled a book from the shelf, examined it briefly, and slid it back into place. “I spent so much of my childhood trying to figure out how to make him see me. Really see me. Not just as his son, but as a person.”
Maggie's heart ached for him. Michael had always been the most sensitive of her children, the one who felt things deeply and carried wounds longer than the others. His relationship with Daniel had been complicated in ways that the other children's relationships hadn't been. He had worshipped his father and been crushed by him in equal measure.
“He saw you,” Maggie said. “He just didn't know how to show it.”
“Did he, though?” Michael turned to face her, and she saw something raw in his eyes, something that had been buried for years and was now fighting its way to the surface. “Because sometimes I think he only saw what he wanted me to be. Not who I actually was.”
“Michael…”
“I became a cop because of him. Did you know that? He always talked about service, about duty, about making a difference. I thought if I did something meaningful, something that helped people, he would finally be proud of me.” Michael's voice cracked slightly. “And then I found out about the affairs. About the lies. About the life he was living while he was lecturing us about integrity and honor. And I realized that everything he taught me was a performance. None of it was real.”
Maggie crossed the room and took her son's hands in hers. They were trembling slightly, and she held them firmly, anchoring him.
“What he did was wrong,” she said. “The lying, the cheating, the double life, all of it was wrong. But that doesn't mean everything was a lie. He loved you. He loved all of you. He even loved me. I believe that. He was just too broken to show it properly.”
“How can you defend him? After everything he did to you?”
“I'm not defending him. I'm trying to understand him. There's a difference.” She squeezed his hands. “Your father was a complicated man. He had parts of himself that were good and true, and parts that were selfish and destructive. Both of those things can be real at the same time.”
Michael was quiet for a long moment, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed on something over her shoulder. Finally, he let out a breath that seemed to come from somewhere deep.
“I found letters,” he said. “In his desk at the office, after he died. Letters from women I'd never heard of. Letters that made itclear he'd been doing this for years. Maybe decades.” He pulled his hands free and moved to the desk, opening the top drawer. “I never told you. I never told anyone. I just...I couldn't.”
Maggie watched as he rifled through the drawer, pulling out folders and papers and setting them aside. She had known there were things in this room she didn't want to see, truths she didn't want to confront. But she had also known that this moment would come eventually. You couldn't pack up a life without uncovering its secrets.
“Here.” Michael held up a bundle of envelopes, tied together with a rubber band. “These were in his desk. I don't know if they're more of the same or something different. I couldn't bring myself to look.”
Maggie took the bundle and turned it over in her hands. The envelopes were old, the paper yellowed, the handwriting on the front unfamiliar. They were addressed to Daniel at his office, not their home. Whatever secrets they contained, he had kept them carefully hidden.
“Do you want to know what's in them?” Michael asked.
It was a question she had been asking herself for years. Did she want to know the full extent of Daniel's betrayals? Did she want to catalog every lie, every deception, every moment when he had chosen someone else over her? What would that knowledge give her, except more pain?
But there was another question underneath that one, a question she had only recently learned to ask: Did it matter anymore?
She thought about the woman she had been when she lived in this house—desperate to be perfect, desperate to be enough, desperate to hold together a marriage that had been crumbling from the inside. That woman would have needed to know. She would have read every letter, memorized every detail, used the information to fuel her grief and her rage.
But Maggie wasn't that woman anymore.
