Unit B-17, at a storage place out on Route 40. A big one. Ten feet by twenty. Climate controlled, because Dad would have haunted me if his good tools rusted.
My mother and I spent three full weekends packing up his workshop. Every hand tool, wrapped in old towels. Every chisel. Every clamp. His table saw, his drill press, his band saw. The cabinets he’d built for his own workshop. The big oak workbench he’d made himself the year I was born, with my initials and his carved into one corner where nobody would see them unless they looked.
We packed his canvas tool apron. His blue toolbox he carried to every job. His hand planes, which he’d collected over forty years, some of them older than him.
His brass measuring tape went into a little wooden box with his other measuring tools. His squares. His levels. His marking gauges. I put it on top, so it would be the first thing I saw when I opened it.
Dereck helped. He drove the rental truck. He lifted the heavy things. He didn’t complain once.
When it was all done, and the metal door of B-17 rolled down and clanked shut, I stood in the hallway and cried. Dereck put his arms around me.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s safe now. Whenever you’re ready.”
“I don’t know when I’ll be ready.”
“Then it’ll be here,” he said. “As long as you need.”
He offered to handle the monthly payments.
“You’ve got enough on your plate,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. One less thing for you to think about.”
I was so grateful. I was barely functioning back then. I could barely remember to eat lunch. The idea of one less thing to think about felt like a gift.
So I let him.
The rental account was in my name. But Dereck paid the bill every month. Dereck had a key. Dereck had the access code to the gate.
For a while, that arrangement worked fine.
Then, about a year and a half ago, he started complaining about the cost.
Small comments at first.
“Two hundred and ten a month,” he said one night, going through bills at the kitchen table. “For a storage unit. That’s over twenty-five hundred a year.”
“I know.”
“Just saying.”
Then they got bigger.
“Sheila, it’s been two years,” he said a few months later. “Two years. Over five grand. We could use that money for something.”
“I’m not ready, Dereck.”
He sighed. He let it drop.
Then last spring, after Christmas and a broken water heater and a car repair:
“It’s been almost three years, babe. That’s seventy-five hundred dollars. Sitting in a box. On some tools nobody’s even touching.”
“They’re not some tools,” I said.
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not ready.”
He’d sigh. He’d look at me for a long moment. And then he’d drop the subject.
He always dropped it.
I thought that meant he understood.
At the airport, twenty minutes after I’d hung up with my mother, my phone rang.
It was her.
I picked it up. “Did you find it?”
There was a pause on the other end.
“Honey,” my mother said. “Where’s Dereck?”
Her voice was strange. Low. Careful.
“He’s right here,” I said. “Right beside me.”
“Can he hear me?”
I glanced at Dereck.
He wasn’t checking his phone anymore. He wasn’t looking at the departure board. He was watching my face.
“No,” I said slowly. “What’s wrong?”
My mother lowered her voice even more. I had to press the phone against my ear to hear her over the announcements in the terminal.
“Sheila. Listen to me very carefully. Don’t let him know what I’m telling you. Do you understand? Don’t let him see your face.”
I turned slightly away from Dereck. Toward the window.
“Mom? You’re scaring me.”
“Honey,” she said, “he set you up.”
My stomach dropped.
“Come home,” she said. “Now. Right now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Please, Sheila. I’m begging you. Don’t get on that plane.”
Behind me, Dereck reached for my hand.
“Everything okay, babe?” he said. “Did she find it?”
I looked at him over my shoulder. I made my face smile. I don’t know how.
“She’s still checking,” I said.
I turned back toward the window.
“I’m sending you a photograph,” my mother whispered. “Don’t let him see it. Please.”
She hung up.
My phone chimed. A text message.
I opened it.
I froze.
The photograph showed Dereck’s bedside drawer, pulled all the way open.
Dereck’s passport was sitting right on top, where he’d said it would be.
And beside it was a printed receipt. A full sheet of paper, folded in thirds and then unfolded.
At the bottom of the page was Dereck’s name. His signature.
And under that, there was a line that said Location:
And then an address. Route 40.
And a unit number.
B-17.
I knew that number.
I’d been paying for it, through Dereck, every month for three years. I’d stood in the hallway outside it and cried.
B-17 was my father’s workshop.
And then I noticed something else.
In the corner of my mother’s photograph, half-hidden under the receipt, there was something small and gold. Round. Worn smooth on one side.
A brass measuring tape.
Dad’s measuring tape.
The one he’d carried in his shirt pocket every day of his life. The one he’d been holding when he died. The one I’d put in the little wooden box in B-17, right on top, so it would be the first thing I saw.
It was in Dereck’s bedside drawer.
I turned around and looked at my husband.
He was still holding my hand. He was looking at me with a little worried frown, the same frown he always wore when I got upset about something.
“Why,” I said quietly, “is Dad’s measuring tape in your drawer?”
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