Claire remembered a warm spring day.
The day when, as she stained her hands with graphite to sketch a nest for the two of them, her beloved had quietly approached and kissed the back of her hand.
“Take it easy, Claire. You’ll ruin your health at this rate.”
“How could I? I’m drawing our family’s future right now.”
Claire smiled as she pointed to a corner of the blueprint she had been drawing for quite some time.
“Do you see? Our child’s room will be the safest and happiest space in this house.”
Washers smiled after checking where Claire pointed.
“An attic is connected to it? How cute.”
“A child needs their own sanctuary. I always dreamed of a space like this when I was young.”
Washers whispered as he gently wrapped his arms around Claire’s swollen belly.
“Claire. You’re going to be a wonderful mother.”
“Of course. Though whether you’ll be a good father remains to be seen?”
“What? Claire!”
Washers put on an exaggeratedly hurt expression and began to tickle Claire.
Claire burst into a girlish giggle.
A dreamlike, sweet time followed.
The two built a small, sturdy house of love, and soon Adriel was born.
Mathematically speaking, three signified completeness.
Their little paradise, which had been enough with just the two of them, became complete with Adriel’s birth.
Whenever the toddler took his first waddling steps down the hallway, Washers would lift the child high and laugh heartily.
Watching that sight, Claire felt a happiness so sharp it made her heart ache.
She wanted to stop time and live in this moment forever.
However, at some point, a silent crack began to form.
While other children his age babbled “Mom” and “Dad,” Adriel kept his mouth tightly shut and focused on his play.
Even when his name was called, instead of making eye contact, he would merely observe the ornate patterns on the wallpaper over Claire’s shoulder.
“Claire. Isn’t the child a bit… strange?”
At Washers’s words, Claire finally acknowledged the heartbreaking truth.
The fact that her child was a little different from others.
But she firmly shook her head at the question of whether the child was strange.
“Adriel isn’t strange. He’s just slightly different from everyone else.”
Adriel was very poor at expressing his emotions through words.
But in those moments when he would fiddle with Claire’s fingertips and pick out a seashell that suited her as a gift, his actions were clearly filled with love.
Though Adriel was lacking in many areas compared to other children, he could memorize and recite all the complex scientific names of the numerous marine creatures illustrated in Claire’s biology books.
That was something other children couldn’t do.
To Claire, Adriel was not a patient to be cured.
He was her one and only star in the world, shining brighter than the light bulbs she had spent her whole life researching.
He was the fruit of the love she and her husband had created.
“I don’t know, Claire.”
But Washers didn’t think like Claire.
The warmth had vanished from Washers’s eyes as he looked at the child.
***
The child was not easily accepted by the people around him.
The day Adriel was kicked out of daycare and returned home.
“I’m going to close the clinic for the time being,” Washers said, his face stiffened. “You’re incredibly busy with your light bulb research. So, it would be better for me to look after Adriel.”
Claire looked at him with an expression of mixed apology and gratitude.
“But you’re busy, too. There are so many patients waiting for your touch…”
“I’m fine,” Washers replied firmly. “No patient is more urgent than Adriel.”
Claire was deeply moved by Washers’s devotion.
Without knowing the true intentions hidden behind his words.
It was nearly one month later when Claire noticed something was wrong.
“…Adriel?”
The child’s reaction was different than usual.
Adriel was shivering, curled up in the cold darkness.
He had even cast aside the marine life encyclopedia he usually loved.
“Adriel, are you okay? Adriel!”
Not knowing what to do in her anxiety and panic, Claire ran to the study and shouted to Washers.
“Adriel is strange! He seems terrified, and he’s not in a good state!”
Washers, flipping through a medical journal, answered nonchalantly without even looking up.
“It’s probably nothing. He was always a strange kid.”
It was unbelievable.
To think he could react so indifferently when his own son seemed to be hurting.
However, this side of Washers wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to Claire.
It was exactly like the Washers who worked at the hospital.
She saw an overlap with the man who would issue a prescription and then watch a patient’s reaction, observing the progress of a disease without batting an eye, whether the patient vomited or screamed.
‘Could it be…?’
She had an ominous premonition.
‘I have to check.’
The next morning, Claire left the house, pretending to go to the laboratory as usual.
Then, exactly one hour later, she returned.
The house was silent.
“Adriel? Washers? Where is everyone?”
The two were nowhere to be seen — not in the master bedroom, the study, nor on the second floor.
‘Are they here, perhaps?’
Claire’s gaze turned toward the wall of the child’s room, toward the door to the attic.
The space she had designed so the child could dream the happiest dreams while being protected from the world.
The door that Claire herself would not open without permission to ensure his privacy.
With a trembling hand, Claire pressed the button to open the attic door.
*Rumble.*
The door opened.
At that moment, a terrible sound reached Claire’s ears.
It was the sound of something wailing like a beast.
What Claire witnessed as she rushed into the room was…
***
“I’ll skip the details,” Claire said with a pale face. “I don’t even want to recall it. Just know that the madman was abusing Adriel.”
“You mean Mr. Washers?”
“He claimed he was trying to ‘treat’ Adriel. So that he could become a normal human being.”
Claire bit her lip hard.
“But that was a joke. Treatment? It was torture!”
Just that much was enough for me to imagine the rest.
‘It was a good thing I sent Toby out.’
This wasn’t a story for a young child to hear.
“I couldn’t stand it. I told him I wanted a divorce.”
“Was it you who first proposed the divorce, Mrs. Claire?”
“Yes. That man, Washers, clung to me until the end, saying he couldn’t break up. That he still loved me. But I simply couldn’t live skin-to-skin with a human being who abuses my child.”
“The public says Mr. Washers abandoned his wife and child and left.”
“Oh, I know. It must have looked that way from the outside. Looking only at the situation, it appeared as if he were leaving me and Adriel behind. Besides, both of us kept our mouths shut regarding the reason for the divorce.”
I could roughly guess why Washers had kept quiet.
It wasn’t exactly a divorce to be proud of, and it wasn’t the divorce he wanted.
But why Claire?
“I didn’t want to expose this to the world.”
With a thoroughly exhausted and tired face, Claire rubbed her own face.
“He is a prominent doctor. To think such a person treated his own son like a mental patient, locking him in a room and abusing him. If this fact were known, it wouldn’t be him, but Adriel who would be pointed at. They would say he really was a mental patient who needed to be locked up. They might even say that ridiculous ‘treatment’ should continue.”
‘I see.’
Until now, I had been under the mistaken impression that Claire and my goals were the same.
That we both wanted to catch the real culprit of the case and get an acquittal for Adriel.
But strictly speaking, Claire’s goal was to prevent Adriel from being dragged off to a mental hospital.
That was why Claire couldn’t bring herself to talk about the secret of the attic until she was driven to this situation.
Whether Adriel was found innocent or guilty, if this secret leaked out, he might face the same outcome.
“I wanted to make it as if all of this had never happened. I didn’t even want to look at that horrific space where my child was abused. So, with my trusted friend, Dolores, I removed the attic door handle and the button to open the door. Then, we applied plain white wallpaper to completely cover the door to the attic.”
“So that’s why the attic became invisible to the naked eye.”
I thought it was strange for some reason.
The drawing room of this house had ornate floral wallpaper, and the fish room on the second floor had blue marine life patterns.
Yet, the child’s room on the first floor had pure white wallpaper without a single pattern. No matter how you looked at it, it looked hastily done.
‘If only I weren’t from a world where all-white interiors were the trend, I would have noticed sooner.’
Or perhaps I was just distracted by the intense red bloodstains splattered on the white wallpaper.
Regardless, that wasn’t what was important right now.
“Based on what you’ve said, the murdered Ms. Dolores knew about this attic.”
“…Yes.”
“And she was found murdered right in front of the attic’s hidden door.”
Even a fool could figure it out.
“No matter how much I think about it, the attic seems to be related to the case.”
“I’ve thought of that, too! But… that’s impossible.”
What was she talking about now?
“I told you. We sealed the attic door. We removed the handle, took out the opening button, and covered it with white wallpaper.”
Claire continued to explain.
“The attic door was designed in a special way for the child’s enjoyment. It’s not a door that opens and closes on normal hinges; it’s a door that slides along rails on the floor. Just like that train over there.”
I looked down at the model toy train scattered on the floor.
I saw circular tracks and a tunnel the train could pass through.
“So, are you saying the attic is in this state right now?”
I said as I pushed the model train into the tunnel.
In this case, the train was the door, and the tunnel was the wall.
And the front of the tunnel was this room, while the back was the hidden attic.
The train cannot come out to the front of the tunnel because there are no rails there.
“In this state, if you push the model train inward and pass it through the tunnel, a passage for someone to go through will be created. That’s when the door opens. If you push the model train in from the other side, it fills the tunnel and the door closes.”
“Exactly,” Claire said calmly. “Now that the handle and button have been removed and the door can no longer be pulled, the attic door — which can only be pushed — has become one-way. It can only be opened from the outside and closed from the inside.”
And right now, the attic door was so completely closed that it didn’t even show a hint of its existence.
That meant only one of two things.
That the attic had never been opened since it was sealed…
Or that someone existed inside the attic who had closed the door and was now hiding.
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