Sophia Vance had not opened her mother's boxes in eleven years.
There were nine of them in a storage unit in Long Island City that Richard paid for by direct debit and had never once visited, and Sophia knew the code because she was the one who had packed them — at twenty-two, three weeks after the funeral, while her father sat in a hotel in Zurich and did not take her calls.
She let Maya in at nine on a Wednesday morning and put the light on.
"I want to say something before we start."
"Say it."
"If it turns out my mother knew what he did to your father and stayed married to him for four more years, I need to be the one who finds it." Her voice was steady. Her hands were not. "Not you. Not Ethan. Me. That's my condition."
"That's fair."
"It isn't," Sophia said. "Thank you."
The fir
