The storage unit had been purchased unseen at auction for sixty dollars. Renata had expected furniture, maybe appliances, the kind of detritus that accrues around a life and gets abandoned when the rent runs out. What she found was a complete record of a person she had never met: photo albums organized by year, journals in consistent handwriting from 1971 to 2019, a box of letters sorted by sender, a file cabinet of tax returns and receipts, a shelf of books annotated in pencil. She spent a day going through the surface of it before she found the name: Gerald Fitch, born 1951, apparently deceased. She found no contact information for anyone who might want these things. She called the auction house, who referred her to the storage company, who told her the account holder was no longer reachable and the contents were legally hers. She did not throw anything away. Instead she rented a second unit and moved everything there and organized it the way she imagined Gerald would have wanted. She read the journals slowly, one entry per night, over the following two years. By the time she reached the end she understood Gerald's adult life better than she understood her own. She started keeping a journal on January first of the following year, the first she had ever kept, writing in pencil.