Chapter 3
The Folder That Was No Longer in the Drawer
For the next hour, the house had the strained, muffled atmosphere of a train station after a missed connection, with doors opening and closing too carefully and footsteps crossing the hallway without conversation, until Sarah took Lily to school in a silence that seemed to follow the SUV all the way down the street.
Carolyn decided that the internet would remain because it belonged to the house and because Lily should not be made to feel the consequences of decisions made by adults, while anything personal to Sarah and Greg—including their phones and the subscriptions Carolyn had been paying without much thought—would become their responsibility from that day forward.
She found two subscriptions she had forgotten she carried, canceled them, moved her financial statements from the unlocked desk drawer in the den into a document case, changed the password on her banking account, and then noticed the empty space at the bottom of the drawer where Robert’s thick blue folder marked HOUSE RECORDS should have been.
She knew the folder well because she had disliked it for years, packed as it was with old receipts, permits, insurance papers, appliance warranties, and documents Robert had insisted on saving long after she considered them useful, although after his death she had opened it once while transferring the homeowner’s policy and remembered its weight and the particular faded blue of its cover.
Carolyn searched the desk drawer twice, then the filing cabinet, then the shallow cupboards beside the den shelves, while afternoon light gathered dust in the corners and the house settled around her with faint creaks, and by lunchtime she had persuaded herself that she must have moved it during one of her cleaning moods because that explanation was easier to hold than the alternative.
She went upstairs to the bedroom she and Robert had once shared, where the space had changed by degrees after Sarah moved in—her sewing chair had been sent to the basement to make room for exercise equipment, Lily’s board games rested beside Carolyn’s dresser, and two storage bins filled with Greg’s winter clothes had taken their place beneath the window.
None of those things had seemed outrageous when they arrived one at a time, yet as Carolyn stood among them with the faint warmth of the late afternoon pressing through the glass, the room no longer felt entirely shaped around her life.
She began with the closet and spent three hours sorting possessions into four boxes for donation, until she found a photograph of Robert tucked inside an old gardening book, where he stood beside the backyard fence in the ridiculous straw hat David had given him for Father’s Day, his grin made permanently foolish and tender by the instant the camera had caught.
On the back, in Robert’s neat handwriting, were six words: For Carolyn, when you finally simplify.
May you like
She held the photograph for a long moment, then set it on the bed beside an old wooden box containing Robert’s watches, cuff links, letters, and the miscellaneous objects whose value existed only because his hands had once touched them, until her fingers reached the bottom and found a small brass key wrapped with a strip of masking tape.
Robert had written only two words on the tape: East wall.
