I have the key — she gave it to me years ago and told me to give it to you if things became difficult.” A pause.
“I think things have become difficult.”
The storage unit was twenty minutes from the hospice.
A small, climate-controlled room that smelled of old paper and cedar.
Metal shelving along both walls.
Every shelf was full.
Boxes labeled by year, going back decades.
I opened the nearest one.
Letters — dozens of them — addressed to adoption agencies, to hospitals, to government offices.
Replies, mostly form letters.
Denials.
Dead ends.
The paper trail of forty years of searching.
I opened a box from fourteen years ago.
Inside, beneath a stack of legal correspondence, was a photograph I hadn’t seen before.
Eleanor, older now, standing outside a building I recognized.
The building where I had worked before I started volunteering.
A candid shot, slightly blurry, taken from a distance.
