Chapter 4: The Storage Unit
Samuel parked beyond the last row of storage units, where the security light flickered as if it couldn’t decide whether to stay on. Beyond the fence, traffic hissed along the highway. My father’s brass key had warmed in my closed fist during the drive.
“Stay behind me until we know what that lock looks like,” Samuel said.
“I’m not hiding in the car.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
He didn’t argue. That was how I knew he was worried.
The unit was near the back, its number painted in flaking blue. A strip of fresh metal showed bright beneath the lock, and the hasp hung crooked, bent away from the door.
Someone had tried to get in.
Samuel stepped between me and the entrance. “You recognize the damage?”
“No.”
“Then we don’t assume the key makes this safe.”
He examined the surrounding units, then crouched to look at the gravel. A smear near the threshold might have been a shoeprint or just dirt tracked in from the road. He stood and put one hand on the damaged door.
“Call the police?” I asked.
“And tell them what? That someone may have forced a storage unit whose contents we haven’t seen?” His gaze held mine. “If there’s someone inside, we leave. If there isn’t, we take what we can and go.”
The lock had been replaced with a cheap brass one, the kind sold near a register. My key slid into it and turned.
The door lifted an inch, then jammed.
Samuel gripped the edge. I took hold beside him. Together we pulled until the door rattled upward with a metallic shriek that seemed to travel the length of the building.
We froze.
No footsteps. No voice. Only the low electrical hum of the lights.
Inside, cardboard boxes sat in close rows, each labeled in my father’s handwriting. Clinic. Foundation. Thomas—personal. The letters were narrow and firm, exactly as they’d been on the envelope. Seeing them there made the back of my throat tighten.
“He planned for this,” I whispered.
“Looks like he planned to keep records.”
Not answers. Records.
The distinction mattered.
Samuel eased farther in while I stayed near the door. A folding table stood beneath a bare bulb. On it rested a stack of envelopes tied with string, a ledger, and several family photographs in paper sleeves.
I took the ledger first. The cover had softened at the corners, but the pages inside were clean. Dates, amounts, initials. My eyes moved down the columns until one line caught.
Victoria Vale. A payment to the fertility clinic.
The date was three days before Ryan’s appointment.
I read it twice, then held the page toward Samuel without letting go.
“That’s close,” he said.
“Close isn’t an explanation.”
“No.” He leaned over the book, careful not to touch the ink. “But it’s a record. Not someone’s memory of what happened.”
The number in the amount column was large enough to make my stomach clench. There was no note beside it, no description of services. Only a code and a set of initials I didn’t recognize.
My phone buzzed in my purse. I flinched. The screen showed no name, only a new message from an unknown number: Don’t take anything that isn’t yours.
Samuel saw my face.
“What is it?”
I showed him.
He looked toward the open doorway. “We’re done here.”
“But we haven’t checked the letters.”
The envelopes were arranged by date. Some bore clinic letterhead. Others had no return address, just my father’s neat labels: Copies. Follow-up. Questions unanswered.
I slipped the ledger beneath my arm and reached for the nearest bundle.
A door slammed somewhere down the corridor.
Samuel grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back as a cough of gray smoke rolled along the ceiling outside the unit. Then the alarm began—shrill, relentless, filling the narrow building with a warning that made thought impossible.
“Move,” he said.
A sprinkler snapped open overhead. Cold water struck the concrete and splattered across the boxes.
I shoved the clinic letters beneath my coat. Samuel took the ledger, but I clamped down on it.
“I can carry it.”
“Madeline—”
“I can.”
For half a second, we stood there fighting over the proof my father had hidden. Then another sprinkler burst. Water hammered the table, splashing the photographs and darkening the paper sleeves.
Samuel released the ledger. “Then take it. Go.”
A shape shifted at the far end of the corridor.
I couldn’t see a face—only a quick shadow slipping through the smoke toward an exit.
“Someone’s in there,” I said.
Samuel moved to block the corridor, but the shadow vanished behind a row of units. The alarm wailed on. Water poured from the ceiling, soaking our hair and sleeves.
We ran.
Outside, the cold air struck my wet face. Samuel shoved the door of his car open, then turned back when I stopped beneath the flickering security light.
One of the photograph sleeves had slipped from the bundle under my coat. The picture slid onto the wet pavement, face down. I bent to retrieve it.
May you like
It showed my parents on the day I married Ryan. My younger self stood just beyond the frame, close enough that the edge of my white dress was visible. Behind them, Victoria stood beside a man whose face I recognized from the clinic correspondence: its director.
On the back, in my father’s handwriting, was the date of my wedding.
