I come back on Thursday morning.
The room looks different in daylight.
There’s grey light through the single window facing the back garden and I stand in the doorway with my father’s journal in my hand and I look at what I didn’t fully see when I was here at midnight with shaking hands and the blindness of someone moving too fast through something important.
There are nine boxes.
I counted them last night but the number was abstract. Now I count them again in the morning light and get nine, and nine is a real number in a real room with real handwriting on every label in the slanted print of a man I never knew.
ALDRIC VOSS, the labels say.
Some of them add categories: RESEARCH. PACK RECORDS. LETTERS. PERSONAL.
One just says SERA, and I look at that one for a long time before I mov
