The Secret of the Shed
It was a cold November morning when Andrés García, 72, breathed his last in the bed he had shared with his wife Carmen for four decades. Cancer had taken him in six months, leaving a deafening silence in their country home in Toledo. Carmen and Andrés’s 40-year marriage had been as solid as the stone walls of their home, a love that had grown slowly, like the vines in their vineyard. Andrés, a carpenter of few words, was the man who could fix anything that broke, but he had never had children with Carmen, the silent pain of their lives.
Days after the funeral, as Carmen sorted through Andrés’s belongings, her trembling fingers found something unexpected in the drawer of his nightstand: a bunch of keys she had never seen before. They were three keys joined by a rusty ring, different from those for the house or the car. Carmen’s heart raced. In 40 years, Andrés had never hidden anything from her, or so she thought. The keys pointed to a place Carmen had never set foot in: the wooden shed in the garden. “It’s just old stuff, my love,” Andrés always told her when she asked him what he was doing there. For the first time in 40 years, Carmen felt she didn’t fully know the man she had married.
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