His Father's Files

Cal cut the tape on the fourth box before he let himself admit he was looking for something specific, not simply everything, the way he’d told Nora he would.

The storage unit was climate-controlled and still somehow smelled like his father’s study at the end — cedar and old paper and a staleness that only settles into a room nobody has opened in three years. He’d paid the monthly fee without setting foot in here since the funeral. He’d told himself there wasn’t time, which was true, and that there wasn’t a reason, which wasn’t. He’d had a reason. He just hadn’t wanted to find it alone.

The green ledger was in the fourth box, under a stack of tax returns going back to a decade before Cal was born, bound in the same cover Teodoro had used for every private accounting he’d kept close enough to touch himself rather…