Chapter 14: The Box

"Now?" I said.

"I close at noon. It's eleven-fifty." He was already pulling down the awning. "And it's raining, so I'm not losing much."

"I have a baby."

"I noticed. She can ride up front. I've got a car seat."

"Why do you have a car seat?"

"Nephew. Saturdays." He jumped down from the truck. "Keep up, counselor."

The storage place was off Lawrence Expressway, rows of orange doors under a flat gray sky.

Cliff found unit 114 and stood in front of it for a second without moving.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Six years," he said. "I paid for this thing every month and never once came back."

"Why keep paying?"

"Because throwing it out meant he won." He crouched and fitted the brass key into the padlock. "And opening it meant I'd have to look."

The door rolled up with a long scream of metal.

Inside was one dusty bicycle, a folded futon, and a single cardboard box marked KESTREL in black marker.

He carried it out under the overhang where the light was better.

I parked Rosie's car seat next to us.

She'd fallen asleep on the drive with her fist against her cheek.

Cliff cut the tape with his car key.

He lifted the flaps.

On top was a coffee mug with a cartoon bird on it and a crack down the side.

"First mug," he said. "First office. Blake bought eleven of them at a gas station."

Under the mug was a framed photo.

A dozen people in a garage, squinting into the sun, holding paper cups.

Cliff was in the middle, younger and thinner, with no beard and a lot of hair.

Blake was beside him with an arm around his shoulders, laughing at something off camera.

The board chair stood at the very end, in the same vest she'd worn to the party.

Cliff looked at it for a long time.

"We wrote the first version in that garage in nine weeks," he said. "He did the pitch. I did everything else. I thought that was fair."

"It was fair."

"Then why does it feel like I got robbed?"

"Because you did."

He laughed, one short breath through his nose.

He set the picture face down on the concrete.

Under it were notebooks, cables, a hard drive in a padded envelope.

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