My husband said the storage unit was empty — he had been paying for it every month for fourteen years.
And then I looked at the paintings again.
She is the same age in all of them.
Thirty-one canvases spanning fourteen years and she is nineteen in every one, in the same green jacket in nine of them, in the same three or four poses, over and over.
They are all painted from the same photograph.
And I know that, sitting on a floor, because I have been married to a man who taught art at a further education college for eleven years and I know what it looks like when somebody has one reference and no other.
And then I opened the first box.
2011–2012.
On the top of it, in a plastic wallet, there is a page from the Halstow Gazette dated the eleventh of August, 2011.
And there is the photograph.
The green jacket. The low wall.
Her name was Freya Ostrom. She was nineteen.
The ninth of August, 2011.
Reuben was twenty-nine. He was driving home from a job on the Wexham road at about twenty to seven in the evening in August daylight.
And a nineteen-year-old stepped into the road in front of him.
She died.
He was not at fault.
I want that flat and early, because it matters and because it is the finding of a coroner and not an opinion.
The inquest was in March of 2012. Accidental death. He was doing twenty-six in a thirty. There was no braking failure and no phone and no drink and there was nothing he could have done in the distance available.
The coroner said so in terms, and the transcript is in that box, and the relevant paragraph is on page nine and Reuben has underlined it in pencil, which I think is the worst thing in that entire room.
