The Things We Hide

Chapter 1: Laptop

The laptop was not on the desk.

Mara noticed this at three sixteen on a gray Sunday afternoon, the kind of afternoon when the light seemed tired before it even reached the windows.

Her coffee had gone cold beside a stack of unopened mail. A delivery truck groaned somewhere below the apartment, followed by the heavy slam of a door. In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed against the silence.

Mara stood in the doorway of the spare room and stared at the empty place beside the lamp.

She always left the laptop there.

It was an old machine with a cracked corner and a space bar polished smooth by years of use. The battery lasted less than an hour, and the fan made a faint rattling sound whenever she opened too many tabs. Two stickers were peeling from its lid: a faded moon and a small blue whale.

It was not valuable in the way new things were valuable. But it held seven years of photographs, half-finished essays, saved messages, and the notes for the two final assignments due the next morning.

It also held the life Mara had built before the apartment—before everything she owned had been packed into cardboard boxes and carried into rooms that still did not feel like home.

She checked beneath the desk.

Then under the bed.