I was sitting on a cold concrete floor in a storage unit I didn’t even know we rented, holding a brass key the size of my thumb, looking at a crib. A real crib. White paint, put together, with a little mobile of stars hanging over it.

And I kept thinking, who buys a crib. We’re 51. We were 51. Dale was 51 when the semi hit him on the highway.

We were married 23 years. I want you to sit with that number before I tell you the rest, because the rest doesn’t make sense unless you know it. Twenty-three years. I knew how he took his coffee. I knew he hummed when he was nervous. I knew the scar on his hand from the table saw. I thought I knew everything. That was the whole problem.

Let me back up. After the funeral I had to clean out his truck from the impound lot. Nobody warns you about that part. They hand you a plastic bag of a person and tell you where to sign. So I drove out there and I went through the cab myself because I couldn’t stand the idea of a stranger doing it. Registration. A pile of napkins. A tin of breath mints, which I remember thinking was odd because Dale never carried mints, he hated the taste. And in the back of the glove box, a key.

Small. Brass. Stamped right into it: Unit 14-C. There was a paper tag too. Coleman Road Self-Storage. I sat in his truck and turned that key over for probably ten minutes. We didn’t have a storage unit. We had a garage and an attic and too much junk already. I almost put it back. I’ll be honest with you, part of me already didn’t want to know.

But I drove over there anyway. I don’t know why I do this to myself.

The man at the front desk pulled up the account when I showed him the death certificate. He squinted at his screen. “Climate-controlled, that one,” he said. “Hundred eighty-nine a month.” Then he kind of whistled. “Paid up through 2031, ma’am. Whole thing prepaid.”

Nine years. Paid nine years in advance. I just stood there because my brain kind of stopped working for a second. Who pays nine years up front on a storage unit. You do that when you don’t want anybody asking questions. You do that when you don’t want a bill showing up at the house.