If you want me to continue the story, here’s the next part:
I cleaned the sheets.
I washed the blankets twice.
I scrubbed the floorboards, sprayed the curtains, emptied every trash can in the bedroom, and even pulled the nightstand away from the wall to make sure some dead mouse hadn’t crawled underneath.
Nothing.
The smell remained.
And somehow, it was always strongest on my husband’s side of the bed.
At first, Daniel laughed when I mentioned it.
“You’re imagining things,” he said.
But I wasn’t.
I knew that smell.
It was sweet and sour at the same time—the unmistakable stench of something organic slowly rotting.
By the second month, I stopped sleeping normally.
I would lie awake staring at the ceiling while Daniel slept beside me, completely undisturbed.
Sometimes I caught him looking at me.
Not lovingly.
Not sleepily.
Almost as if he were waiting to see whether I had figured something out.
Then one night, I woke at 2:17 a.m.
The bedroom was silent.
Daniel wasn’t beside me.
I sat up and heard a faint scratching sound beneath the bed.
I froze.
Scratch.
Scratch.
Scratch.
I switched on the lamp.
The sound stopped.
Daniel suddenly appeared in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
His voice was strangely sharp.
“I heard something under the bed.”
He stared at me for several seconds.
Then he smiled.
“There’s nothing under there.”
But the next morning, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.
One of the wooden boards beneath his side of the mattress had been replaced.
And the screws were brand-new.
That was when I realized the smell wasn’t coming from the mattress.
It was coming from inside the bed frame.
I waited until Daniel left for work.
Then I grabbed a screwdriver.
My hands were shaking as I removed the first screw.
Then the second.
When I finally lifted the board, I expected to find a dead animal.
Instead, I found a small black suitcase.
And taped across its lid was a photograph of me.
On the back, written in my husband’s handwriting, were six words:
“She was never supposed to find this.”