They met on a dating site and didn’t seem very compatible, but once they got talking they realized they did have deeply rooted commonalities. They decided to meet. Their first date was at a coffee shop, as cliché as that was, and their in-person chemistry was off the charts. She was a brunette blue-eyed classically trained pianist and lawyer; he was a nighttime security guard and weigh-lifting enthusiast. Despite their drastically different lifestyles, they clicked immediately, and after the coffee shop, they took off to his place for a nightcap and she never really left. That first glorious week was spent falling head over heels in love, and slowly moving her belongings to his apartment. Despite the short getting-to-know you period, they both felt satisfied this sudden commitment was a good one. Besides they were both in their early thirties, the time for coy courtship was long past.

They kept opposite hours, she woke at 6 to start her long day at a law firm, where she was on her way to becoming a partner, and he was just coming home at 6 from a long-night keeping watch at a local hotel. They began a lovely tradition of meeting at the door for a quick kiss, and then he would fix coffee and breakfast for her while she showered and prepared for her day’s work. They had evenings together, and would usually spend them on the front porch with wine for her and coffee for him before they once again parted ways and he headed off to work at ten pm while she watched the nightly news and dozed off.

It was a quickly comfortable existence for the two of them, mere strangers days before, now cohabitating in something akin to bliss. The “I Love Yous” started on the second day and soon were said with the regularity and normalcy of a long-married couple. Mercifully, they both had weekends off, and within a few weeks were already establishing traditions: Saturday brunch and farmer’s market followed by dinner out, Sundays were spent entirely in bed with coffee, movies, and takeout Chinese food.

It was three weeks in and they were spending a Saturday morning cleaning out her storage unit she had maintained since her divorce and subsequent domicile downgrade a few years prior. They decided to keep most of her belongings even though they weren’t particularly needed, he had a large basement she could put it all in until she decided to have a massive garage sale at some indefinite time in the future. His staircase downstairs was narrow and twisty, and they had a hell of a time getting some of her more awkwardly shaped furniture down there, but they laughed the whole time, having a great time together in even the most irritating of situations.

After they had brought all of her items downstairs, she began to put books and trinkets on shelves, when she noticed a huge bureau in the corner. She walked over to inspect it, thinking it might be a good place to keep her “fat” pants she hoped never to fit again. She pulled on one of the drawers but it seemed jammed shut.

“What are you doing?” His voice suddenly had an edge to it that she had never heard.

“Oh, is this full? I thought I could use it.”

“Yes, don’t use that one. We’ll get you a new one.”

“Is it locked or something?”

“Yeah, I keep important documents in there, and I’d prefer if you didn’t go nosing in there.” She felt as though she’d been slapped. He suddenly seemed so angry.

“Okay, geez… Sorry dear. If it’s important to you, I won’t look through your stuff.” He looked at her, and could tell he had hurt her feelings. His face softened.

“Sorry babe, I’m just very meticulous when it comes to tax forms, mortgage information, stuff like that. I’m kind of terrified of getting audited actually… happened to my brother a few years ago and he was a nervous wreck.”

“No problem baby, I get it.” She smiled and hugged him, but that moment lay in her brain and niggled at her.

The days went by peacefully, Spring was slowly turning into summer and the weather was becoming warm and humid. One night, it was so hot in the house, despite the A/C, that she couldn’t get comfortable enough to sleep. He had mentioned that there was a fan in one of the closets so went looking for it. She first checked the hall closet, but there was nothing on the shelf but rain boots and winter gear. She went back into the bedroom and sized up the walk-in closet. It was large and the shelves were packed full with all sorts of junk they hadn’t gotten completely organized yet. Maybe the fan was up there in the back. She got a stool and pulled it into the closet to get a better look. It was a jumble of books, movies, clothes, and notebooks. In the back she saw the fan against the wall. She stood up on tiptoes to reach it and could barely grasp the top of it over a large stack of magazines in front of it. She shoved the magazines out of the way and accidentally knocked a stack of papers onto the floor in the process.

“Damnit!” She stepped off the stool to pick up the mess. As she started stacking the papers into a neat pile, her eye fell on the top one: it was a 1098 form for that year. “What the…” She began quickly flipping through the rest of the papers: they were tax forms, insurance forms, mortgage information, the house deed, bank account statements, etc. These were the items he supposedly kept in that locked bureau in the basement. She sat there dumbfounded for a few minutes; he had lied to her, and over something so stupid. They had hastily built their relationship on a simple foundation: no lies, no baggage, nothing but blind faith and trust. For any relationship to thrive, both parties must cast their insecurities aside, but especially one started at this juncture in their life, when children could (and would need to be) quickly on the horizon. How stupid she felt, sitting amidst the proof of his lie.

She sat there for a beat longer, and then stood up, decisive. There was a good reason he had lied about that bureau, and if she was going to commit herself fully to this man, she needed to know why. She remembered how angry he had gotten when she had tried to open the bureau, and shuddered at the memory. Asking him was out of the question. She still had six hours before he would be home, and in the meantime she was going to find a way into that bureau.

She looked through the rest of the closet, hoping to find a set of keys, but the search was in vane. She gave up on the obvious territory and perused the house. Then she remembered: a few days prior, he had told her a story of his party days when he had hidden a drunk friends keys in the freezer, knowing that’s the last place they would look. She quickly ran downstairs and threw open the freezer. Tossing frozen vegetables and ice trays aside, she saw a plastic bag in the corner, barely tucking out from a box of hamburger patties. She pulled it out and sure enough there was a key inside. She smiled at the find but felt sudden trepidation at this endeavor. What if what he was hiding was really bad? Or what if it was absolutely nothing, and she was breaking his trust for no reason. She reassured herself that he had already broken her trust, and reminded herself she would never get to sleep if she didn’t investigate. She walked down the creaky basement stairs, which seemed so much more threatening at midnight, and made her way to the bureau. Her heart was thudding. She tried the key. The lock was old and rusty but it gave, and the drawer opened just enough for her to get her fingers in there and wedge it fully open. She was staring at a photograph of a beautiful woman. Wide blue eyes, freckles, blonde hair, maybe twenty years old at most. An ex-girlfriend? Relative? Who was this? She picked it up for further inspection and saw that there were more photos underneath; a lot more. She picked up the stack and shuffled through it. There must have been one hundred pictures there, and as she flipped through them, she saw that they were mostly all different girls. Was he a photography student at one point? He had never mentioned it, but then again, they were still getting to know each other.

Her heartbeat slowed down a bit, there was nothing nefarious here, just a drawer full of youthful memories. There may have been a few ex-girlfriends there, but she wasn’t bothered. Some men like to have concrete reminders of their youthful indiscretions. Smiling, she started to put the photos away, when one caught her eye as she slid it into the drawer. It was a lovely Hispanic woman who looked to be in her late-twenties. The woman was smiling joyfully and looking off to the side of the camera, and something about her seemed eerily familiar. She stared at the photo for a few minutes, trying to place it, perhaps she had seen the woman around town, it wasn’t a big city, and she knew he had lived there for ten years. It could be an ex-girlfriend that lived in the neighborhood, but she wasn’t quite sure. There was something at the back of her brain, like a quiet whisper she couldn’t quite make out. She put the picture away and locked the cupboard, making sure to put the key back exactly where she had found it.

Maybe someday she would mention this night to her boyfriend, after they had been together longer. The relationship was still new, and she didn’t want to tarnish it with an argument.

She got the fan set up next to her bed, climbed under one sheet, and quickly dropped off to sleep. Sometime later she began to have troublesome dreams with an unseen entity trying to get at her through the darkness. She awoke covered in sweat and trembling. The clock read four, which meant she had two hours left of sleep if she could get there. She laid back down and tried to calm her mind and slowly felt herself drifting off again, when a name flashed across her mind: “Emilia Gray.” She sat up in bed, speaking aloud to herself “what the hell?” Sometimes when she fell asleep, she had auditory half-waking dreams, but this seemed more like a memory than one of those meaningless sentences. Emilia Gray. Who was that exactly? Could it be a past client or relative of a client? She didn’t think so. She debated her options: either attempt more restless sleep, or wake up and put this mystery to rest.

She hated these moments: as a sometimes composer, she had her best musical revelations at four am and always regretted sleeping on it. Nothing was ever as good in the morning. She begrudgingly pulled herself out of bed and powered up her Mac Laptop. She pulled up her work files, which she had saved since her very first client right out of grad school. She did a quick search for “Gray” and came up with nothing. There was also no “Emilia.” She tapped her fingers on the desk and stared at the screen. Hell, why not, she thought as she pulled up google. “Emilia Gray” wasn’t exactly “Dweezil Zappa” but there couldn’t be that many of them in the U.S.

She started to type in “Emilia G” and surprisingly, google auto-filled in the rest of the last name. She hit enter and immediately felt as though she had been punched in the gut. There was a color photo of the Hispanic woman from the bureau with an accompanying headline “Search continues for missing woman.” She sucked in her breath, and with shaking hands, clicked on the link. It was dated one year prior, and was in the newspaper of a town fifty miles away. She read the entire article and then eagerly searched the net for more information. Emilia Gray was twenty-eight when she went missing. She had been a bartender who lived with her boyfriend and took care of her sick grandmother every day before work.

Most of the articles she found were mere blurbs, written months after she went missing, mostly stating that yes, she was still missing. She needed a meatier article to go on. She continued looking until she finally found an article written the week Gray went missing. It was long and detailed. She slowly read every word until she reached the last sentences: “Gray was last seen talking to a security guard who works next door to her bar. Gray’s co-worker Amy Margaret states that the man had just gotten off work and had a fancy camera with him. He was offering to help Gray build her model portfolio for free, in exchange for free drinks. Margaret states that she didn’t see either of them leave, but assumed they left together. This man is now considered a person of interest. He is tall and dark-haired with a very muscular frame. It is also now believed that he got his job under a fake name.”

She shuddered and her eyes instantly welled up. In her few moments of extreme panic, she never heard the car pull into the driveway, and as she began to search in desperation for her purse and keys, she also never heard the bedroom door slowly opening.