Then she walked to the wine cellar.

For years a bottle had hidden the small mechanism for the secret panel — the little daily act of concealment she’d stopped even noticing she performed.

Lenore picked it up and set it on another shelf, and left it there, and uncovered the elevator button that led down to the room where she had been, all along, entirely herself.

She did not hide the entrance behind anything.

She had spent eight years disguising the door to her own life, and she was done disguising it.

She pressed the button once, and the door opened, and she stepped inside without a backward glance at the bottle she would never again put back.

THE END.