Cold air and dust greeted me.
At first, the unit looked exactly as I remembered. Stacked plastic bins. A rolled rug. Two dining chairs Lauren had refused to throw away because they belonged to her grandmother. A tall mirror wrapped in a blanket. Boxes labeled in her handwriting.
Teaching supplies.
Christmas.
College.
Photos.
Mom’s dishes.
Then I saw the table.
It stood near the back, cleared of dust, with a cardboard box placed carefully in the center.
On top of the box was another envelope.
Marcus.
I stepped inside slowly, the overhead bulb flickering after I pulled the cord.
The storage unit smelled like cardboard, old wood, and time. Outside, a truck passed somewhere beyond the fence, its engine groaning and fading away.
I opened the envelope.
This note was shorter.
If you came here, then you read the letter.
That is something.
Inside this box are pieces of a life I need you to look at before we speak. Not because they will change what you did. They won’t.
But because you have been telling yourself a story about me.
About us.
About what my accident took away.
You need to see what was already there before the accident, and what you stopped seeing after it.
L.
I set the note down and opened the box.
The first thing inside was a photo album.
Our wedding.
I almost closed it immediately.
But I didn’t.
The first page showed Lauren standing beneath the oak tree behind her mother’s house, her veil lifted by the wind, her eyes bright with a happiness so unguarded it made me ache. I was beside her, grinning like a man who believed he had been given something rare and knew it.
Page after page, we appeared as strangers who had once occupied our bodies.
