There was never a decision.

It was a thing that happened to me at fourteen with a scraper in my hand.

He put the hidden room in in 1999.

This is the part that people always want to be sinister and it was not.

There is a chimney breast in that house that got demoted in 1961 when somebody put in forced air, and it left a void on the second floor between the landing wall and the back of a bathroom — four feet by six, seven feet high, entirely useless.

And my father, who could not bear a useless space, framed a panel into the back of it with a magnetic catch and put a shelf in and called it, for the rest of his life, the archive.