Page 94

I strip off my gloves, sling a towel across my shoulders, and reach for my water bottle before heading toward the locker room.

Sprout is already sitting in front of the apartment door when I step inside, watching the handle with complete confidence that breakfast is the only reason anyone leaves home.

“You’ve had a rough morning, haven’t you?” His tail pounds the hardwood before he trots toward the kitchen, glancing over his shoulder every few steps to make sure I’m following. “I was gone less than an hour.”

He ignores that entirely.

I fill his bowl, grab the coffee that finishes brewing behind me, then carry a fresh mug into the study after he settles beside his breakfast.

The apartment stays peaceful this early. The twins won’t be awake for another hour, and Mom is likely relaxing.

Sprout wanders into the study carrying one of his toys, drops it beside my chair, and looks from the empty desk to me as though he’s noticed the same absence.

“I know.” He gives the toy an encouraging nudge anyway. “I appreciate the effort.”

Satisfied that he’s done his part, he circles beneath the window and stretches out on the rug while I turn toward the storage boxes stacked against the wall.

They’ve been there since the move.

I’ve opened them over the years whenever I needed paperwork or another photo album, but I’d never emptied them from beginning to end.

During the first year after Celeste died, every photograph carried enough memories to make me close the lid again before I’d looked through half the box. Later, I convinced myself I’d already found everything worth keeping.

I pull the first box onto the rug and brush a layer of dust from the lid before opening it. Photo albums sit on top beside Christmas decorations, hospital bracelets from the day Babs and Biddy were born, and folders packed with paperwork we’d both meant to organize someday.

I work through the rest of the box one folder at a time, sorting insurance paperwork, school newsletters, instruction manuals for appliances we’ve replaced twice, and even the receipt for a toaster that barely survived six months before giving up.

Every page belongs to the ordinary life Celeste and I built together, but none of it brings me any closer to the woman the staff at Haven House described, so I stack the paperwork into tidy piles, slide the empty box aside, and pull the next one toward me.

I work through the second box more slowly than the first because it’s filled with the ordinary pieces of our family life. Birthday cards, finger paintings, school concert programs, and photographs pass through my hands one after another, each one carrying memories I’d forgotten until now.

A photograph slips from one of the folders onto the rug.

I pick it up and smile.

Celeste sits cross-legged on the living room floor with seven-month-old Babs beside her, both of them laughing while Sprout backs away from a spoonful of mashed banana with all the suspicion he’d normally reserve for the vacuum cleaner.

“You figured that out early.”

Sprout cracks one eye open from his place beneath the window, decides breakfast was enough excitement for one morning, and settles back down.

I slide the photograph onto the growing stack beside me before finishing the box. The rest holds tax returns, utility bills, and grocery receipts from stores we’ve long since stopped visiting.

None of them brings me any closer to the woman the staff at Haven House described.

The third box is heavier. I drag it across the rug and stop halfway through the first folder when the Haven House logo catches my eye.

Beneath the first receipt is another. Then another. Soon the rug is covered with donations I’d never thought twice about before.

I spread the receipts across the rug instead of filing them away. Some charities are familiar because we’d always agreed where we wanted our money to go, but several organizations don’t ring a bell.

A plain black notebook rests beneath a folder of old bank statements. It looks out of place.

The cover has softened with years of use, the elastic hangs slightly loose, and the corners carry the kind of wear that comes from being tucked inside a handbag every day. I don’t remember seeing it before.

Sprout lifts his head as I settle back into the chair and slip the elastic free.

The first page isn’t a journal. It’s a list of names.