My husband said the storage unit was empty — he had been paying for it every month for fourteen years.
And the man said: “I’m Freya’s dad.”
Wilf Ostrom.
He took over the running of that site in 2016. He had been doing something else and his back went and a friend offered him the desk job.
And in his second week he was going through the accounts and he came to unit 214 and he recognised the name.
And he has known for nine years and he never said one word.
Not to Reuben. Not to anybody. He said — standing in that row, in the sun, to a woman sitting on the floor of a storage unit — “It wasn’t my business. He was paying his eighty-seven a month like everybody else.”
Nine years.
And then in August of 2019 — eight years after, on the ninth — Wilf was in the yard at about half seven in the morning and Reuben’s van came in.
And Wilf Ostrom walked over and said four words.
He said: “I know who you are.”
And my husband, forty years old, sat down on the kerb of that row and could not speak for about ten minutes.
And then Wilf made him a cup of tea in the office.
And they have sat in that unit together every August since 2020. Six times.
That is what the two chairs are. That is what the kettle is.
Six years, one morning a year, a man who was driving and a man whose daughter died, in a metal room with the door up, for an hour or so
