Tish and Leo built nooks and hideaways into their home.
Some were simple - easy mysteries tucked into corners or between books, like the tiny portraits of strangers Tish painted and hid behind each of the laundry chute's little brass doors, or the old armchair Leo wrestled into a largish closet in the hall. He called it the smoking room and insisted on keeping a ratty old paisley bathrobe ("A smoking jacket!" he'd laughed when he spotted it at the thrift store) draped across the back of the chair. Whenever their dog, a retriever-something mutt named Cheesecake, would go missing, they invariably found him behind the winter coats, curled into a happy dog-doughnut on the worn leather seat.
Some of the nooks were projects they tackled slowly in stolen hours when they got home from work. Tish wanted a solar, a holdover wish from a childhood spent reading books about castles. Up in the attic, she scrubbed away dust and cobwebs, chasing out the shadows. She dug at the joins between floorboards with a pin and sanded the rough window sills, ancient desiccated grime kicking up into the air and settling softly on her hair.
Leo brought up a mess of extension cords and power tools and half price Ikea shelving. He divided the attic into a sitting room and a secret study with a hidden entrance, putting up bookshelves as walls. Sometimes Leo would stop mid-construction to sketch out improved plans for making one of the shelves into a hidden door. Whenever she heard the skritching of his pencil across his notebook, Tish would watch Leo out of the corner of her eye, falling in love with the look of concentration on his face (which was made slightly ridiculous by the forgotten nails and screws still sticking out of his mouth) and the careful, deliberate motions his hands made as he drew their secrets in bold charcoal strokes.
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