William brought brunch and waited for Rosaline to open the door for 10 whole minutes before she came out still half asleep.
1 hour later, all three of them were well fed, and William snuck Rosaline from the secret door to avoid the stalkers and brought her to his house.
“This is not a house.”
“Excuse me!”
“This is a Villa or maybe a Mansion, not a house.”
“OH”
“…”
“I still think this is a house, in fact, a home. Just head inside and you’ll know what it means.”
Rosaline squinted at him as he led her to the living room.
The “house” was a three-story Mansion with an outhouse, huge lawn, a big garden, a separate garden on the back which had neatly arranged trees – mostly several kinds of fruits and medicinal plants, and a separate garage.
The gate and entire boundary looked like they had been refitted and reconstructed with better security. With just a glance, you could see it was nigh impossible to trespass into. Moreover, they both knew there were hidden cameras covering every inch of the land without any blind spots.
William had even raised a huge wall with spiked mash wires on top between the back garden and the rest of the area of the mansion. The wide gate could be opened one way only.
Besides the entire boundary was raised up to 15 ft high and there were mash-wires on top of them with pointed spikes which were connected to electricity. Anyone who touched it would get a minor shock and it’d raise an alarm.
However, as soon as Rosaline entered the living room, she understood what William meant.
An entire wall was dedicated to the pictures of a man, one who had built it and lived in it for his entire life. It has pictures going from when the first stone was laid when the first tree was planted when he was working on the designs when the first furniture was installed, and many more – he looked like a teenager in those pictures.
After that was a large picture of his wedding day and then came the pictures of the next phase of his life.
There were pictures of when he got married, the first time the bride entered the house, the first thing she cooked in the kitchen, first date together after marriage, first trip together, the first flower she planted, the first car they bought together, pregnancy pictures.
Then came large pictures of their only child. And beyond that were the pictures of the family together.
Pictures of the childhood of that child till his teenage years. After that pictures of that child became very few and in between, and most pictures were of the couple doing their everyday thing or celebrating. Then came another round of marriage, pregnancy, and newborn pictures but they were too few and too far between.
After that was a large picture of the couple together – that seemed like their last. All the pictures after that were of the single old man. The very last picture looked like the person had aged over 100.
Rosaline’s eyes had welled up as she went through the whole wall. She summed up the entire wall into one phrase – A Life well lived.
All the pictures on that wall were taken in different parts of that home. Rosaline understood why William called it home.
That huge mansion was home to that old man – he had built it himself and he had lived his whole life there. The liveliness of the enthusiastic teenage, the happy home of the married man, the contentment of the father and grandfather, the loss of his life-long companion, the serenity on his eyes on the very last picture – they were an expression, a movie which showed how he had lived his life extraordinarily. How the big mansion had become a warm home.