I had honored my mother-in-law’s firm rule that the guest room stay completely private for months. The morning after she left, I found she had been concealing something under that bed that left me deeply unsettled.

The guest room now carried the scent of clean, vacant air instead of Jacqueline’s lavender lotion or Theodore’s peppermint cologne. Only a faint yeasty warmth remained in the corner, an odd smell I had never quite identified. I dismissed the strange odor because a cool autumn breeze moved through the window and bright sunlight fell across the bare mattress.

I stood at the foot of the bed with my hands on my hips and smiled at the open space. Six months had gone by, and this room belonged to me again.

“Goodbye, guest room,” I announced to the quiet walls. “Hello, brand-new home office!”

I took hold of the elastic corner of the fitted sheet and tugged it hard.

“Oh, come on, don’t stick now,” I muttered when the sheet refused to give.

Down the hallway I could hear my husband, Zachary, moving in the kitchen as he rinsed a coffee mug. He had offered to help strip the bed, but I had waved him off because I wanted to take this room back myself.

The sheet caught again and would not leave the corner.

I pulled the fabric once more and thought of my own mother, another woman of closed doors and tightly held secrets. My mind went back to the troubling things that had come out from behind her bedroom door when I was twelve.

An hour later, Zachary and I helped them carry every single bag of grain out to the car trunk.

By afternoon, Zachary and I were sitting together at the kitchen counter, tearing off warm pieces of homemade banana bread with our fingers while the quiet guest room sat empty down the hall.

On our kitchen windowsill, a tiny jar labeled R-07 sat in the sunlight, bubbling happily away.