# Chapter 39: The Attic Door
Hello everyone, it’s me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 39 of *The Housemaid* — and fair warning, this chapter is a cold, creeping nightmare dressed up as a fairy tale. We’re going up into the attic, and once we get there, the door is not opening. So grab a cup of tea, settle in, and let’s see exactly how a perfect husband becomes the most terrifying person in the room.
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Three months into her marriage to Andy Winchester, Nina still feels like she’s dreaming.
She married the man of her dreams — handsome, wealthy, stable, and absolutely devoted to both her and her little girl, Cecelia. Before Andy, Nina had only known men who played games. But Andy was different. He wanted a serious relationship. He wanted to provide. He wanted to be a father figure to Cece. He even had a former fiancée, a woman named Kathleen, whose photos Nina had seen and quietly obsessed over. A sweet, blond woman. A little too similar to Nina herself, maybe. But Kathleen wasn’t trashing Andy anywhere online, so Nina took that as a good sign.
There was only one real flaw in this perfect picture: Andy’s mother, Evelyn. Cold, critical, and always on the verge of judging Nina’s parenting. But nobody loves their mother-in-law, right? So Nina married her prince.
And for three months, she floated. She stayed home with Cece. She worked out to keep her body perfect. She bought white clothes because Andy loved her in white. She studied recipes. She wanted to be worthy of him. Sometimes she still couldn’t understand why he chose her — but she had stopped asking questions and decided to simply be grateful.
Then one ordinary night, after tucking Cece in, Andy waits for her in the hallway, smiling. But his smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
He points out that her roots are starting to show. Just a small comment — but the moment lands strangely. Nina touches her hair, embarrassed. She’s so busy with Cece, she forgot her salon appointment. Andy doesn’t seem angry, but something in his expression is off.
Then he changes the subject.
He needs her help finding some work papers in the upstairs storage area. There’s a contract he has to finish. And afterward, he says, with a grin — you know.
Nina follows him upstairs without a second thought.
The attic is not what she expected. It’s not a storage room full of junk. It’s a small, cramped room with a cot in the corner, a dresser, a mini-fridge, and a single tiny window at the far end. It feels like a prison cell waiting to happen. But Andy points to the closet and says he stores everything in there.
Nina walks over, opens the closet, and finds nothing inside except a blue bucket. No papers. No files. Nothing that requires a two-person search.
Then she hears the door slam shut.
She turns around. She’s alone. Andy is gone.
She tries the doorknob. It won’t budge. It’s locked.
She calls his name. Nothing.
She pounds on the door. She screams. She hears footsteps — but they’re moving away, fading down the stairs.
Maybe he didn’t hear her. That must be it. She checks her pockets — no phone. It’s in the bedroom. She looks out the tiny window: it faces the backyard, and nobody is there. She pushes on the window. It doesn’t move. She pushes harder. Then she looks closer.
The window is painted shut.
At first, she’s annoyed. She imagines giving Andy an earful when he comes back up. She assumes it’s a faulty lock. How embarrassing — they’ll have to get it fixed. She screams his name for fifteen minutes. Nothing. Thirty minutes. Her throat is raw. Her fists are red. Where is he? Did he fall down the stairs? Is he unconscious somewhere? That’s the only explanation that makes sense to her.
Then she hears a voice on the other side of the door.
“Nina?”
It’s Andy.
She cries out in relief. She got locked in, she tells him. Didn’t he hear her screaming?
He says yes. He heard her.
Silence. Then: “Can you please open the door?”
“No. Not yet.”
Nina doesn’t understand. Did he lose the key? No. So why not open the door?
Then Andy’s voice turns sharp. “I said *not yet*.”
Ice slides down her spine.
She tries to bargain. She tells him he needs to let her out. She tells him she doesn’t know what he’s upset about, and they can talk. She pleads, she threatens, she kicks the door until her toes hurt.
But Andy remains calm. Too calm. His voice is even and cold, like a man explaining a simple rule to a child.
“You have to learn your lesson before you can be let out.”
Nina realizes, in a rush of sick horror, that she had spent the whole engagement searching for Andy’s one fatal flaw. She thought it was his mother. She thought there was nothing wrong with a man who was too perfect.
But she found it.
Andy exits with one final remark: “You’re upset. I’ll come back when you’ve calmed down.”
Then his footsteps fade.
Nina screams after him that she’s calm. She screams that she’s leaving him. She pounds and pounds until her hands ache and her voice cracks. But there is no answer. Only the silence of a locked door, a small slanted ceiling, and the terrible truth of what she has married.
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What a chapter. Honestly, this one gave me chills. The slow realization that Andy isn’t just a controlling husband — he is cruel, patient, and deeply dangerous — is masterfully terrifying. The contrast between Nina’s dreamy narration at the start and her terrified desperation at the end is so sharp that it feels like falling. The detail of the painted-shut window, the blue bucket, the empty closet — it all adds to the atmosphere of imprisonment. You can feel every second of that thirty-minute wait, and then the horror when you realize Andy heard everything and simply walked away.
This is the chapter where the mask comes off, and it is chilling.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars
**Next Chapter Prediction:** We’re about to find out exactly what Andy’s “lesson” is, and I don’t think Nina will be released quickly. But something tells me she won’t just accept her fate — after all, Nina is stronger than Andy thinks. Next chapter, I predict Nina will start looking for ways to escape, and possibly discover something hidden in that attic — maybe evidence of what happened to Kathleen, or another woman who once stood in her exact same spot. She may be locked in, but she is not broken yet. And Andy has no idea what he’s just done.
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