We recently rented a summer house for a week-long vacation with family. The house was fine — not perfect, but fine — but one night, while we were all watching a movie on TV, one of the kids leaned the wrong way on a storage cabinet and an entire shelf came unhinged. No one saw exactly what happened. The child is five, the storage cabinet is cheap and badly made, and we had no idea whether it was broken before. So we jammed the cabinet back together so that it looked okay — knowing full well it was not fixed — and left the property “as we found it.” We got our security deposit back, but now I’m feeling guilty. Should we have told the owners about the broken shelf?
— Vacationer
