Five years ago, I buried my best friend Elena and adopted her six-month-old daughter, Lily. My husband Shawn and I raised her as our own. We were happy until three nights ago.

At exactly 2:00 a.m., I heard Lily speaking through the baby monitor. It wasn’t babbling. It was fluent — in a language she’d never learned.

When I woke her, she calmly said she hadn’t been dreaming.

It happened again the next night. Same time. Same strange language. A therapist told me sleep talking was normal, but something felt wrong.

On the third night, I lay beside Lily and used a translation app.

Language detected: Icelandic.

The translation froze my blood:

“My mom is alive. Go up to the attic. She’s there.”

Elena — Lily’s biological mother — had died in a car accident five years ago. I had buried her. There was no attic secret. There couldn’t be.

Still, at 2:00 a.m., flashlight in hand, I pulled down the attic ladder.

Upstairs, I found a thin mattress. Empty bottles. Food wrappers from our kitchen.

And a woman.

She was older, pale, terrified. She climbed down after me, begging me not to scream. I called 911.

Police arrived quickly. The truth was worse than anything supernatural.

The woman had been homeless. Days earlier, she’d seen Lily outside and approached her. Lily, feeling confused about being adopted, had shared something she’d overheard — Shawn and I discussing whether to tell her the truth.

Lily had been carrying that alone.

The woman saw opportunity.

She told Lily she could help her speak to her “real mother.” She showed her a cheap glass orb and taught her Icelandic phrases. She convinced Lily that her mother’s spirit was in the attic — but it had to stay secret.

Lily let her in through the back door.

The woman hid in our attic for a week, sneaking food at night and returning upstairs before morning. We never heard a thing.

She was arrested for trespassing and manipulating a child.

The next day we installed cameras, changed locks, sealed the attic. But the real issue wasn’t security.

That night, we sat down with Lily and told her the truth gently: Elena loved her deeply. We adopted her because of that love.

Lily thought for a moment and asked, “So I’m extra loved? Because two moms loved me?”

“Yes,” I told her. “Extra loved.”

The attic didn’t scare me.

What scared me was realizing my daughter felt so alone that she trusted a stranger with a question she couldn’t ask us.

The danger wasn’t in the attic.

It was in the secrets we thought were protecting her.

That ends now.