My husband said the storage unit was empty — he had been paying for it every month for fourteen years.
“Fourteen years.”
I got married in 2011. So: almost the whole of it.
He let me through the barrier and pointed down the second row.
And I want to describe the walk, because it was about ninety seconds and I have relived it more than almost anything else.
I was telling myself things.
Old furniture. Boxes from university. His mother’s things — she died in 2013 and he could not sort them at the time.
I was doing what everybody does, which is building an innocent explanation in advance so that you have somewhere to stand.
And I got to 214 and I stopped.
The padlock was clean.
Everything else on that row had a film on it — orange dust off the yard, six months of weather. That lock was bright.
And the concrete in front of the door was swept. Not clean. Swept. You could see the arc of it.
Somebody had been there, and not long ago.
I got the key in on the third try because my hands had gone.
The lock came off. I put both hands under the handle and rolled the door up.
And for about four seconds I could not make sense of what I was looking at.
It is not a mess. That is the first thing.
It is the most organised room I have ever been inside. Twenty-six archive boxes on metal shelving, two deep, every one of them labelled on the end in his handwriting with a range of dates.
2011–2012. 2012–2013. All the way along.
