My husband said the storage unit was empty — he had been paying for it every month for fourteen years.
And what I kept getting stuck on was not the money. Eighty-seven dollars a month is not nothing but it is not a catastrophe.
It was the fourteen years.
Nobody forgets for fourteen years. You forget for four months. You forget for a year if you are chaotic and Reuben Croft is the least chaotic man I have ever met; that man labels the freezer.
In May he went to Aberdeen for three days.
And I went through the filing box in the spare room, which took about two hours, and near the bottom of a wallet of old paperwork I found a receipt.
An address on the Wexham road, out past the retail park.
UNIT 214.
And taped to the back of it, a key.
I drove out there on the Thursday morning.
It is a hundred-odd units in three rows behind a chain-link fence and a barrier.
The man on the desk is in his sixties. Big, slow-moving, reading glasses pushed up.
I gave him the name and the unit number and he turned to his screen and he smiled and said:
“Two-one-four.”
And something in my stomach went.
I said, “Is that — is there a problem?”
And he said: “No. Your husband’s had that one a long while.”
“How long?”
He looked again. And he said:
