The storage unit smelled like old cardboard and dry heat.
Mia stood in the doorway and let her eyes adjust—stacked boxes, her mother's rocking chair wrapped in moving blankets, the bookcase she and Ethan had bought at a garage sale and never reassembled. The artifacts of a life paused mid-sentence.
Lila's box was in the back left corner. Taped with blue painter's tape—Lila had always hated the way packing tape pulled at cardboard. Even that detail, so precise and so Lila, made something tighten in Mia's chest.
She cut the tape with a box cutter and folded back the flaps.
Books. A scented candle. A University of Texas pennant. A rain jacket. And beneath all of it, wrapped in a plain paper bag, two composition notebooks—the kind with the black-and-white marbled covers that Lila had used
