I FOUND MY OLD JOURNAL HIDDEN UNDER THE LOOSE FLOORBOARD IN HIS ROOM
My fingers closed around the cool, dusty edge hidden beneath the rug.
I hadn’t been looking for anything, just trying to shove a storage box under the bed on my hands and knees. My knuckles scraped the floor near the wall, finding a loose board I’d never noticed before. There was a small gap, and something thick was wedged deep inside, deliberately hidden. It felt like old cardboard.
A sharp anxiety hit me instantly, my heart pounding against my ribs. I pulled harder, pulling out my childhood journal, the faded blue one I thought I lost years ago at my parent’s. I held the weight of it, confused. Why on earth was *this* here, in *his* room? “What is that?” he asked, voice tight, appearing in the doorway.
I stared at him, clutching the journal, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes, looking past me. The small room suddenly felt incredibly hot and suffocating. I slowly opened the brittle, yellowed pages; the faint smell of old paper filled the air. I flipped towards the back, where I used to write notes.
There, scrawled in fresh black ink, was a name I didn’t recognize at all, circled repeatedly. A date from last month was next to it. “Why is this name in *my* journal?” I finally whispered, my voice trembling. It made no sense, none of this made any sense at all.
Under the strange name was the address for his ex-girlfriend’s new apartment building.
👇 *Full story continued in the comments…*He finally looked at me, his face pale, eyes wide. “It’s… it’s nothing,” he stammered, taking a step back towards the door frame. “Just… a note.”
“A note?” I repeated, my voice rising, echoing in the small room. “In *my* journal? Hidden under the floorboards? With her address?” I gestured with the book, the flimsy pages rustling. The sweet, nostalgic scent of old paper now felt tainted, cloying.
He rubbed the back of his neck, refusing to meet my eyes again, looking fixedly at a spot on the wall behind me. “Okay, look… it’s about Sarah. The name… that’s the guy she’s seeing now. I… I just wanted to know where she was, who he was.”
My stomach churned, a cold dread spreading through me. “You were tracking her?” The words were flat, stripped of emotion by sheer shock. The journal felt heavy and somehow contaminated in my hands, a relic of my past twisted into a tool for his present obsession. “And you used *this*? My old journal? You hid it here?”
He took a hesitant step towards me, hands open slightly as if to placate me. “It wasn’t tracking, not really,” he insisted, though his voice was tight with defensiveness. “I just… I needed to know. After everything… I just needed to know she was okay. And the journal… it was just… a place to put it. I knew you wouldn’t look here. It was safe.”
Safe? The word echoed in the small, suffocating room. Safe for *him* to hide his intrusive, disturbing curiosity. Safe from *me* finding out what he was really doing. I looked down at the childish drawings and messy handwriting on the page opposite the harsh, black ink of the name and address. This wasn’t just a note. This was a window into something dark and hidden, something he had kept secret, tucked away just like the journal itself.
The man standing before me, avoiding my gaze and offering pathetic excuses, wasn’t the man I thought I knew. He wasn’t safe. Clutching the journal, my childhood innocence violated by his actions, I finally met his eyes, and the decision was clear, sharp, and irreversible.
“Get out,” I said, my voice low but steady, unwavering. “Get out of my house.”