I took a few days off work, packed a small overnight bag, and made the three-hour drive back to the house I hadn’t stepped foot in since I was a little girl. It was the house he had kept in the divorce, the one he had supposedly lived in with his younger woman.

When I turned the key in the lock and pushed open the heavy front door, the first thing that hit me was the smell. It didn’t smell like a home shared with a vibrant, younger partner. It smelled like dust, old coffee, and profound loneliness.

The air was stale and suffocating. I walked through the living room, running my fingers over the faded upholstery. There were no feminine touches. No second toothbrush in the bathroom. No photographs of a new life. Just endless stacks of books, an old television, and a single framed picture of me from my middle school graduation sitting on the mantle.

I expected to feel like I was sorting through a stranger’s things. I expected to feel angry or vindicated. Instead, I just felt a creeping sense of unease. Where was the life he traded ours for? I spent two days boxing up dishes and donating old clothes.

On the third day, I pulled the string to the drop-down attic stairs. The wooden steps groaned under my weight as I climbed up into the sweltering heat of the roof space. It was mostly empty, save for some old holiday decorations and a single, small cardboard box shoved deep into the far corner, tucked underneath a dusty tarp.

I dragged the box out into the weak light filtering through the attic vent. It was heavily taped, and scrawled across the top in my father’s careful, looping handwriting was one word: Her. I broke the tape with my thumb and pulled back the cardboard flaps.

Inside, sitting right on top of a stack of manila folders, was my old high school diary. It was the faded pink journal with the cheap, broken brass lock. The exact same diary I used to hide under my mattress when I was fifteen years old.

The one where I poured out every single broken, emotional, venomous teenage thought about my father. I wrote about how much I hated him. I wrote about how my mother was a saint for dealing with the wreckage he left behind. I wrote about the pain of not being enough to make him stay.

I hadn’t seen this book since the week before I moved out for college. I had always assumed it got lost in the shuffle of packing boxes. Seeing it sitting there, perfectly preserved in my dead father’s attic, made the hair on my arms stand up.

How did he get it? Why did he have it? My hands were physically shaking as I picked it up. The cover was worn soft from how often I used to hold it.