The house was their shared dream, built of plaster dust, the scent of fresh-cut pine, and the echo of their mingled laughter. For three months, Maya and Raj had poured every spare hour and every last rupee into the old two-story building, their love a tangible thing in the way they moved around each other, passing hammers and sharing paint-splattered smiles. The house was slowly transforming under their hands, shedding its skin of neglect to reveal the warm, solid bones of a home. Their home.
Raj was, in every sense of the word, perfect. He was the kind of man Maya’s friends spoke of with an air of mythical reverence. Attentive, funny, and impossibly handsome, with a patient calm that could smooth any of her frayed edges. He saw the renovation not as a chore, but as the construction of their future, and his optimism was the foundation upon which everything was built.
On a sweltering Tuesday afternoon, Maya was working alone in what would become the nursery. Raj had gone on a supply run, his parting kiss still warm on her cheek. Sunlight streamed through the dirty window, illuminating a galaxy of dust motes as she wrestled with a stubborn sheet of plasterboard. With a final heave, it tore away from the wall, releasing the musty smell of decades-old air. And there, tucked deep inside the yellowed fibreglass insulation, was a folded piece of paper.
Curious, she pulled it out. It was a child’s drawing on old, brittle construction paper. The art was crude but cheerful: a smiling sun, a lopsided house, and a stick-figure family holding hands. A mother, a father, a little boy, and a smaller girl with pigtails and a brightly coloured dress. But something was horribly wrong. While the other figures were pristine, the little girl had been violently, furiously scribbled out with a thick black crayon, the paper torn in places from the sheer force of the scrubbing. A chill, sudden and unwelcome, snaked up Maya's spine. It was just a creepy relic, she told herself, a remnant of some long-gone family's forgotten drama.
Shaking off the unease, she decided to send a picture to her sister, Neha. It was exactly the kind of morbid thing they’d laugh about. She snapped a photo, typed out a caption Look at the creepy thing we just found! Future kid's room is definitely haunted lol” and was about to select Neha’s name. At that exact moment, a loose piece of plaster from the ceiling crumbled and fell, startling her. Her thumb, hovering over the screen, tapped and sent the message.
A second later, her phone buzzed with the delivery confirmation. She glanced down and her heart gave a little jolt. In her haste, she hadn't sent it to Neha. She'd sent it to Raj. She sighed, a small laugh escaping her. He’d think she was nuts. She imagined his reply: a string of laughing emojis or a text teasing her about being morbid. She went back to work, the image of the savaged drawing already fading from her mind.
Five minutes later, her phone buzzed. It was Raj. But the message wasn't what she expected. There were no emojis, no playful questions. It was a single, stark word, stripped of all warmth.
"Where?"
The word hung in the air, cold and heavy. It wasn't a question born of curiosity. It felt like an demand. An alarm bell, faint but clear, began to ring in a distant corner of Maya’s mind. She typed back, trying to restore their usual lightheartedness. *"In the nursery wall! So weird right? Some kid had issues lol."*
He didn't reply.
When Raj returned twenty minutes later, the easy warmth he’d left with was gone. He walked in carrying a bag of nails, but his eyes weren't on her; they were scanning the room, a flicker of something tense and sharp in their depths.
“Hey, you,” Maya said, forcing a smile. “You won’t believe the…”
“Where did you find it?” he asked, his voice unnaturally calm, cutting her off. He walked past her, placing the bag down with a loud thud.
The cold stone in Maya's stomach grew heavier. “The drawing? Right here.” She pointed to the gaping hole in the wall.
He didn't glance at her. He knelt, his movements precise and economical, and peered into the cavity. It wasn’t the curious inspection of a homeowner; it was the forensic search of an investigator. He reached in and retrieved the drawing, his fingers touching the paper with a strange reverence, as if handling a sacred object or a piece of evidence. He folded it neatly and slipped it into his pocket.
“Probably that crazy old recluse who lived here before,” he said, his back still to her. The explanation was too quick, too polished. “God knows what kind of life he had.”
He turned, and the charming smile was back, but it was a mask, hastily put on and ill-fitting. It didn’t reach his eyes. His eyes were still cold, watchful.
From that moment, the atmosphere in their dream house began to change. The air grew thick with unspoken things. Raj’s perfection took on a new, sinister quality. His attentiveness became surveillance. He’d bring her water before she felt thirsty, fetch a tool before she asked for it. At first, she tried to see it as love. But it felt like he was anticipating her every move, staying one step ahead, leaving her no room to breathe, no room for a thought he didn't already know about.
He began “helpfully” organizing her things. He cleaned out her purse, arranging the contents neatly. He tidied her bedside table. He took her car in for an oil change without her asking. Now he always knew where her keys were, where her wallet was, how much gas was in her car. The gestures, which once would have felt like acts of service, now felt like acts of control.
A few days later, Maya decided she had to break the suffocating tension. “Are you okay, Raj?” she asked as they cleaned brushes in the kitchen sink. “You’ve been acting a little strange since I found that drawing.”
He stopped, turning to her with a look of deep, loving concern that was so flawless it had to be a performance. “Strange? Honey, no. Just tired from all this work.” He reached out, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “Maybe you’re the one who’s stressed? You’ve been working so hard, maybe you’re overthinking things. We’re both exhausted.”
He was so good. His voice was so reasonable, so full of care, that for a moment, she believed him. She felt a wave of guilt. Maybe she was being paranoid. But then she looked into his eyes, and behind the loving facade, she saw it again: the watchful, calculating glint. He was studying her, gauging her reaction, professionally managing her suspicions.
The next evening, she came home to find him installing a new lock on the front door. It wasn’t a standard knob; it was a heavy-duty, double-cylinder deadbolt that required a key to open from the inside as well as the outside.
“Thought we could use an upgrade,” he said, cheerfully tightening a screw. “Extra security, you know? Can never be too careful.”
Maya looked at the thick bolt of steel. She thought of the drawing, now hidden somewhere she couldn’t find. She thought of his constant, suffocating presence. She realized the lock wasn't meant to keep intruders out. It was meant to keep her in.
Fear was no longer a quiet alarm bell; it was a deafening siren. She had to know. Waiting until he was in the shower, his singing echoing through the house in a ghastly parody of their old happiness, she opened his laptop. Her hands trembled. This was a violation, a line she’d never thought she'd cross. But the man she married had already crossed it first.
She navigated to a folder deep in his hard drive labelled "Old Days." It was full of digitized family photos. She scrolled through images of a smiling, happy family from a bygone era. And then she found it. A photo from a birthday party. Raj, no older than ten, stood with his arm around a smaller, younger girl with bright eyes and pigtails, wearing a distinctive, frilly yellow dress.
It was the same dress from the drawing.
With a shaking finger, she opened a browser. She typed his family name, "Verma," and the city he grew up in, "Bareilly." Then she added the words "accident," "fire," "missing."
The search returned a small, archived news clipping from a local paper dated twenty-two years ago. “TRAGEDY STRIKES VERMA FAMILY.”A devastating house fire. The parents, Anup and Sunita Verma, were found dead. Their ten-year-old son, Raj, had survived, pulled from the flames by a neighbour. Their eight-year-old daughter, Ria, was missing. Her body was never recovered from the ashes. She was presumed dead, a tragic victim of the blaze. The case was closed, the cause of the fire officially ruled as faulty wiring.
Maya stared at the screen, her breath caught in her throat. The scratched-out figure. The violent, angry scribbles. Ria.
The singing from the bathroom stopped. The shower turned off.
Panic seized her. She slammed the laptop shut just as the bathroom door opened. Raj walked into the bedroom, a towel around his waist, water dripping from his hair onto the wooden floor. He wasn't smiling. The mask was gone. All that was left was the truth. He looked at the laptop on her lap, then at her face, and he knew.
“You should have left it in the wall, Maya,” he said. His voice was terrifyingly soft, laced with a profound sadness that was infinitely more frightening than rage.
In that moment, the perfect husband she had loved, the man with the easy smile and patient hands, evaporated. He was gone, and in his place stood the little boy who had survived the fire. The boy who had drawn a picture of his family. The boy who had scrubbed out his own sister.
Maya’s eyes darted to the bedroom door, then towards the front of the house. To the new, heavy-duty deadbolt. Her dream house was a prison. Her loving husband was her warden. Her accidental text message hadn't just uncovered a secret. It had turned the key in the lock of a cage he had built long ago.
She looked at the man she had married, a man she didn't know at all. His face was a mask of sorrow, but his eyes were hard as stone. The question of what he would do to keep his secret was already being answered by the silence in the house, by the locked door, by the twenty-two years of practice he’d had at making a person disappear. Her mind, once filled with paint colours and furniture plans, now raced with a single, desperate thought: How do you escape a prison when the warden sleeps next to you?
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