“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’d hoped we’d find the list.”
He shrugged. “At least we tried.” He held up a magazine, an old Sports Illustrated. “You mind if I keep this?” he asked.
She didn’t know why he would want some old magazine, but she didn’t figure anyone would miss it, so she nodded. “You can keep anything you want from that box,” she said.
“Whose stuff is it?” he asked.
She shrugged. “My dad’s.”
“How long have they been divorced?” He closed up the box, taking nothing else from it.
“Since I was two. I don’t remember them ever being together.”
“That’s kinda sad,” he said. “I can’t imagine my parents not being together.”
She wanted to ask: But you can imagine your father with a prostitute? But she didn’t. Mostly because she didn’t want to say the word prostitute to Micah Berg.
As if he were reading her mind, he said, “You’re probably wondering why I’d be looking for what I’m looking for if that was the case?”
She gave him a smile without showing any teeth. “Little bit, yeah.”
“I wouldn’t have thought him capable of something like that, but with everything that’s happened, he’s just been—I don’t know—different. Toward me, toward my mom. He seems like he doesn’t really want to be at home, like he’s sad all the time. And when I overheard him talking about . . .” He paused, then continued. “Well, about your mom’s arrest.” He glanced over at her apologetically. “He seemed like he was talking about it as more than just neighborhood news, as if he—I don’t know—had some involvement, or knowledge. Maybe.” He looked around the small room crammed with stuff. “I could’ve been wrong.” He sighed. “I hope I am.”
“I hope you are, too.”
The silence between them stretched uncomfortably, so she turned to the last stack of boxes and opened the top one. The sight of a whole stack of papers renewed her hope. She picked up the stack, thinking that underneath there could be a drive or disk or anything that could contain the file. But she found nothing under the papers, so she dropped to the ground and began going through them, discovering legal papers from her parents’ divorce, a whole pile of them traded between their attorneys for years.
Some of the papers mentioned her. Her father, unsurprisingly, had not fought her mother for custody. But that was the only thing, from the looks of it, that he hadn’t fought her on. Violet sorted through them, trying to make sense of the legal jargon, to understand just what had transpired between her parents. It had been, from the looks of things, a bitter divorce. Her father had had the better attorney. If there was a winner in the divorce, he had won, conceding to give her mother the home they’d shared but leaving her with little support to afford it. She found pages of back-and-forth between the attorneys over this issue. How could her father have done that to them, to her? Her mother had never told her any of this, and of course, she did not remember. As far back as her memory went, they’d always been OK, better than OK, really. They’d always had the money to do whatever they wanted. Something must have changed. And then it dawned on her what had.
Micah came over and sat down beside her, his eyebrows raised hopefully. “Is there something in that box?”
She shook her head, feeling ashamed, though she didn’t know why exactly. It wasn’t her divorce. But in a way, it was. And the decisions that had come after, as her mother had built her business with a relentless drive Violet never understood, as she somehow got involved with this prostitution ring, all of it had started here, in these papers, as her mother had fought to keep her daughter in her home, to provide for her child. No wonder Norah had taken this storage room out in Violet’s name. She hadn’t wanted her ex anywhere near her things, because he seemed intent on taking whatever he could from her. The client list wasn’t in this storage unit, Violet understood. But their past was—a past her mother wanted to lock up and walk away from. Violet pulled the stack of papers to her chest.
“Seriously. If it’s bad, just tell me,” Micah said. “Don’t hide it. I need to know.”
She shook her head again. “It has nothing to do with your dad. I promise.”
He tried to tug the papers from her, but she held on tight, her eyes hard as she looked at him. “Seriously. It’s old stuff. Legal stuff. It’s nothing.”
He crossed his arms and cocked his head. “So prove it. Let me see.”
She shook her head more forcefully. “I swear to you on my mother’s life that this has nothing to do with the list,” she said.
He blinked at the intensity of her words, then nodded, satisfied that she wasn’t keeping something from him, and stood up. He reached out his hand, offering to pull her up. She shifted the papers into the crook of her left arm and reached out. He pulled her up, and the weight of the papers pulled her forward, into him. For a moment their bodies touched and their hands stayed clasped. Neither of them blinked as they studied each other. The only sound she could hear was their breathing. Then she remembered what she’d looked like in that mirror and pulled away. She didn’t want him seeing her this close up when she looked and smelled like she did.
She put the papers back in the box and moved it over to reveal the one underneath it. She pulled the lid off to find a box of old record albums that had likely belonged to her father. They’d probably fought about them long ago, and her mother had hidden them from him just because she could. Good for you, Mom, Violet thought. For the first time in weeks, she felt proud of her mother.
“You go through this one,” she told Micah, pointing at the albums. “I doubt there’s anything in here, but we might as well look just so we know.”
He mock saluted her. “Yes, ma’am.”
She sneered at him and moved out of the way so he could lift the box and begin. The next box held travel brochures, lots of them. She riffled through them, taking note of the many destinations her mother had been interested in: Hawaii, London, Australia, China. How interesting that this box existed in the same stack with the legal papers. How sad that even as she’d been fighting to keep her house and support her daughter, she’d been dreaming of escaping to someplace far away.
Micah, done with the albums, closed the box and looked over her shoulder, dangerously close again. “Does your mom like to travel?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “We never really went anywhere.”
“Well, she must’ve wanted to. At some point.” He reached into the box and held up a handful of brochures. “I’m getting some ideas for future trips.” She let him look through the brochures while she hurried through the last box, full of old fan magazines from when her mother was a kid: Teen Beat and Tiger Beat. From the looks of things, her mother had had a pretty big crush on Tom Cruise back in the day.
She put the lid back on the final box and turned to Micah again. “There’s nothing in this box, either,” she said. “We should probably get going.”
He put the lid back on his box, too, and stretched. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry we didn’t find anything,” she said.