My husband said the storage unit was empty — he had been paying for it every month for fourteen years.
There is a chair in there. A proper one, a folding canvas chair, not a garden one. Two of them, actually, against the left-hand wall.
And there is a small table with a kettle on it.
And leaning against the far wall, in a rack he had clearly built, there were paintings.
Canvases. Facing in. Thirty or forty of them.
I walked over and I turned the first one round.
It is a girl.
Nineteen, maybe twenty. Dark hair to the shoulder. Sitting on a low wall in a green jacket.
I put it down and picked up the next one.
The same girl.
And the next. The same girl.
I went along that rack and turned eleven of them round and my knees went somewhere around the seventh, and I ended up sitting on that concrete floor with a canvas across my lap.
Thirty-one paintings, and every single one is the same face.
And it is not my face.
And this is where I want to stop and say the thing that everybody skips.
For about four minutes I sat on that floor and I built the obvious story.
A woman. Fourteen years. A room he pays for and visits. A swept floor and a clean lock.
I had the whole thing assembled and I had my phone in my hand.
