One shelf down and one box back: Gray silk—court shoes, possibly—decorated with a diamond pattern in black and crystal bugle beads around a rhinestone flower. He remembers these shoes. She was wearing them on the day he proposed to her. He noticed them as he knelt—you couldn’t help but notice shoes like that, the way they glittered. Very dressy for what should have been an ordinary Sunday. Now that he knows her so much better, he wonders if her choice was a calculated one. She seemed so amazed when he popped his big question—the heaving chest, the wild eyes. But perhaps she’d sensed, somehow, that he was going to propose that day….

Three up and four to the right: A pair of sugar-pink dancing slippers with bow trim. The label says Hellstern and Sons. Demure. Virginal. She might have worn them to a school prom. Did they have proms at those fancy English schools? He couldn’t see it somehow—Genevieve dancing with some pimply boy. It wasn’t her style. And she wasn’t the kind of girl who shone at school dances, in spite of her looks. They’d have been terrified of her. She’d have been stuck at the side, poor thing, while the plain girls waltzed around the floor. And later, she was left stranded at home while her old school friends married those boys. But what did they know, eh? Their loss was certainly his gain. Not that he was the dancing type himself.

Next door to the dancing slippers is a pair of black suede shoes with a curved heel decorated with tiny sequins clustered together like flowers. For some reason he lifts one of these shoes to his face, breathes in the scent of the leather inner. He doesn’t know when she wore them, but he can see them on her feet. She is sitting with one leg crossed over the other, swinging her foot. She is laughing.

She’s never worn the boots one shelf below, but he remembers how much he paid for them. Made of maroon satin with floral embroidery and ribbons for laces, they date from the late 1800s. She tried to present them to him as a hot investment, and the notion tickled him, he had to admit it. Until he saw the price tag.

Robert puts the boots away and pauses for a moment to think. There’s more to this than the pleasure of sneaking about and nosing into Genevieve’s private world. Each of these boxes holds a secret. If he wants to truly understand his wife, he has to learn how to interpret what he finds. He knows precisely which pair he wants to look at next.