She Left Me in Traction, Then the Will Made Me Her Boss novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Yard Log

The Carrow Group freight yard sat at the far end of Airport Road behind a chain-link fence and forty trailers.

We got there at eleven.

Hannah parked the Subaru two hundred feet down the road with the lights off.

"You know this is trespassing," she said.

"I worked here for seven years."

"You were fired in front of forty people. I was there."

"Then it's trespassing with a very good motive."

She sighed and handed me my cane.

The side gate had a padlock with a four-digit combination.

My grandfather had set it the year he bought his first truck, and he had never changed it.

I turned the wheels to 1961.

The lock opened.

Hannah looked at it.

"He never told you the combination."

"I was eleven. I carried his coffee out here every Saturday. I watched him turn it."

The gatehouse was a one-room shed by the main entrance with a light over the door.

It was dark inside, and the door was locked.

I knew where my grandfather had hidden the spare key, and so did anyone who had ever watched him lock up.

It was under the second paving stone, still wrapped in a rag.

Hannah held my phone's flashlight while I pulled the door open.

The room smelled of old coffee and diesel.

There was a desk, a space heater and a gray shelf of binders.

Every binder had a year written on its spine in marker.

"Paper?" she said.

"The company went digital for payments and deliveries. The gate never did." I took down this year's binder. "My grandfather said a gate guard's handwriting couldn't be hacked."

I turned to the Thursday before my accident, three days back from the Sunday of the crash.

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