I Followed My Husband to Our Country House. Inside the Shed, I Found a Photograph of Myself.

For Four Months, He Had Been Going to the Village Without Me

I had expected to find an explanation for the late evenings, the excuses, and the sudden anger whenever I mentioned our country house. Instead, I found a photograph of myself asleep in our bedroom. My husband had placed it inside a notebook, beneath pages of notes about women whose pictures covered the shed wall.

Under my photograph, he had written one sentence.

“The last one. After her, everything will be over.”

I was still looking at the page when the door creaked behind me. Until that moment, I had believed he’d driven away. I turned and saw him standing in the doorway, watching me as though he’d been expecting to find me there.

A Neighbor Told Me He Was Visiting Almost Every Day

We had been married for almost fifteen years. For much of that time, we spent nearly every weekend at our small village house. My husband worked in the garden while I looked after the flowers and vegetable patch. It had always been somewhere we went together.

About four months earlier, he stopped taking me. At first, he said he was busy. Then he told me he was tired. There were days when he disappeared for hours and came home late, but whenever I suggested a weekend in the village, he had a reason we couldn’t go.

I might have continued accepting those explanations if our neighbor hadn’t called. “Listen, has your husband decided to sell the house?” she asked.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Well, he comes here almost every day now. I’ve seen him doing something in the shed several times. And yesterday, he even showed up in the middle of the night.”

That evening, I asked him when we could go back. He kept his eyes on his phone and said there was no reason to visit for now. When I mentioned my flowers, he raised his voice.

“I told you we’re not going!”

He had scarcely shouted at me in fifteen years. I stopped asking, but I couldn’t forget what our neighbor had said about the shed. We stored old furniture, tools, and the lawn mower there. I couldn’t think of anything inside that would require visits in the middle of the night.

On Saturday, He Said He Had to Go to Work

The next morning, my husband told me that something urgent had come up at work. It was Saturday. I waited until he left, got into my car, and followed him. He drove straight to the village.

I parked far enough from our property that he wouldn’t see my car and watched him get out. He took a large black bag from the trunk and carried it to the shed. A few minutes later, he came back out, locked the door, and drove away.

I waited before approaching the fence. The small gate was locked, but I still had my key. Once I was in the yard, I went directly to the shed. I wanted to see what he had carried inside and why he had lied about where he was going.

When I got the doors open, I needed a moment for my eyes to adjust. The familiar clutter had been replaced by large metal cabinets along the walls. Plastic containers stood beside them, and a long table occupied the center of the room. Women’s handbags, jewelry, photographs, and folded clothes lay on top.

At first, I thought he might have been hiding some kind of illegal business. Then I looked at the wall. There were dozens of photographs of women, with dates beneath them. Red crosses had been drawn over some of the pictures.

I Recognized Two Women From Missing-Person Posters

One face stopped me. I had seen it on posters around our city about six months earlier. I remembered looking at that woman’s photograph while people were still searching for her. Beside it was a picture of another woman who had disappeared.

I looked back at the table. There was a thick notebook among the belongings. I opened it and found my husband’s handwriting.

“The second attempt failed.”

“Too many questions.”

“Need to be more careful with the next one.”

I turned the pages until I reached my own photograph. He had taken it recently, while I was asleep in the room we shared. I was trying to understand what he meant by the words beneath it when I heard the door.

“I knew you’d come here someday,” he said.

He stood calmly in the entrance. I had followed him because I wanted to catch him in a lie. Now he was looking at me with his notebook open in my hands, and I couldn’t make myself move toward him.

He Showed Me a Recording With My Voice in It

“What did you do to these women?” I whispered.

He walked to one of the metal cabinets and took out a small box. He didn’t seem concerned that I’d recognized the women or read what he’d written about me.

“You always said I had an exceptionally good memory for faces,” he said. “But the truth is, I simply can’t forget people who get in my way.”

I began edging toward the window. “Did you kill them?”

“Not all of them,” he replied.

Then he took out his phone and showed me a video. It had been recorded in our bedroom. I was asleep, and he was standing beside the bed, speaking to someone on a video call. As I watched, I heard my own voice coming from the recording.

“When are you finally going to get rid of the others?”

I stared at the screen. I knew I had never spoken those words.

“This is fake! I never said anything like that!”

He smiled. “Of course you didn’t. I spent three years collecting recordings of your voice so a computer could speak for you.”

“Why?!”

He set the phone on the table. “Because the police have already received all these recordings. Along with photographs, messages, and documents proving that you were the one who lured these women here.”

I looked from the phone to the pictures on the wall. He had been preparing something much larger than an explanation for his visits to the village. He wanted the police to find me in that shed, surrounded by the belongings and photographs of missing women.

“But you’re the one who did all of this!”

“Yes,” he said. “But who’s going to believe you?”

The Sirens Were Already Approaching

I heard the sirens in the distance. My husband checked his watch as though he were waiting for someone who was due to arrive.

“I called them myself twenty minutes ago. I told them I’d discovered evidence of my own wife’s crimes and that I was afraid to go home.”

He moved toward the door. Before going outside, he turned back and told me something that made me look at the photographs again.

“By the way, you’re wrong if you think those women ended up here by accident. Every single one of them used to be my wife.”

“But you told me you’d never been married before me!”

“And you never asked why all my former wives had the same name.”

I remembered the times he had called me by another woman’s name. Whenever I noticed, he laughed and dismissed it as a slip. I had accepted that explanation, just as I had accepted that he was too tired to take me to the village.

He stepped outside and locked the door. Within a minute, I could hear police officers in the yard. Then his voice rose above theirs.

“Be careful! She’s inside! She might have the tools she used to kill those people!”

The Wedding Photograph Was Only Two Weeks Old

I rushed toward the window. As I moved past the table, I noticed another photograph lying among the belongings. My husband was standing beside a young woman in a wedding dress.

I picked it up and turned it over. The wedding date written on the back was two weeks earlier. He had married her while he was still coming home to me, still making excuses about work, and still keeping me away from the house.

Beneath the date was a short message.

“The new wife is already ready. We can get rid of the old one.”

I held the photograph while the officers spoke outside. My husband had told them he was afraid to come home. Inside the shed, I had just found the picture of the woman he intended to bring home next.

This is a fictional story.