Fifteen years after disappearing without a word, my former tenant knocked on my front door and asked me a question I never expected to hear.
“Do you still own the apartment?”
For a moment, I simply stared at him.
He looked older than I remembered. His dark hair had turned mostly gray, deep lines framed his tired eyes, and the confident young man who’d rented my apartment all those years ago had been replaced by someone who looked as though he’d spent the last decade carrying the weight of the world.
“Ronny?” I whispered.
He gave a small nod.
“I’m sorry for disappearing.”
The words landed harder than I expected.
Fifteen years of occasionally wondering whether the quiet tenant who’d rented my apartment for just one month had ended up in a ditch somewhere, or at the bottom of a river, while I went on with my life assuming I’d simply never know.
Why he’d vanished, whether he’d been alive all this time. He raised a hand before I could speak.
“I don’t have much time.”
His voice was calm, but there was urgency behind it.
“I just need one thing.”
“What thing?”
“The box I hid beneath the floor.”
Every hair on my arms stood up.
“The what?”
“The wooden box.”
His expression never changed. “I buried it beneath a loose floorboard in the bedroom.”
“I’ve owned that apartment this entire time.”
“I know.”
“I’ve never seen any box.”
A flicker of uncertainty crossed his face for the first time.
“Then you never found the loose board.”
He let out a slow breath, almost to himself.
“Good.”
I frowned. “What exactly is in that box?”
He hesitated. Then he gave an answer that only made everything worse. “If someone else found it before me, a lot of people’s lives are about to change.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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