He knew what was in it. Somewhere at the back of his mind, beneath all the years of deliberate forgetting, he had always known exactly where it was.
He crouched down and pulled it out. It was dusty. He wiped the top with his hand, leaving a gray smear across his palm. He carried it out of the storage room and down the hallway to his study, where he set it on the desk under the lamp and sat down.
He did not open it immediately.
He sat with his hands resting on either side of it and looked at the dull brown cardboard and breathed slowly.
He was 61 years old. He had built a company. He had made difficult decisions, managed crises, signed documents that changed the shape of entire neighborhoods. He was not a man frightened of boxes.
He lifted the flaps.
Inside, under a thin layer of dust, the past was exactly where he had left it.
A school report from his final year. He did not know why he had kept it. A folded program from a graduation ceremony. A small leather notebook with a broken clasp that had once been his diary. He did not open that. A few loose photographs.
He took out the photographs.
Most of them he recognized without feeling much: groups of young people he had largely lost touch with, a birthday party somewhere, a trip to the coast with a crowd of school friends, everyone squinting into the sun.
Then 1 made him stop.
Three teenagers in a school courtyard.
He recognized it immediately: the old concrete wall behind them, the way the afternoon light came in at that angle. He was in the middle. Benjamin was on his left with an arm thrown over his shoulder, and on his right, slightly turned toward them, laughing at something, was Victoria.
He sat very still.
He had not seen her face in 30 years. Not in a photograph, not in a dream, not in anything. He had been that thorough about it.
She looked so young. They all did. Absurdly young. The way you can only see in retrospect when you are old enough to know that 16 is just the beginning of everything, though it feels like the whole world at the time.
Her hair was tied up loosely, strands escaping at the sides. She was laughing with her whole face, the way some people do, nothing held back, nothing controlled. He remembered that laugh.
He put the photograph face down on the desk without knowing he was going to do it.
Then he looked back into the box.
There were a few folded letters at the bottom, old ones, the paper slightly yellow at the edges, the way paper goes when it has been kept too long in a box that is not quite airtight.
He took them out one by one. 2 were from Benjamin, written during a summer when Benjamin had gone to visit relatives in another city, joking, rambling letters full of observations about people he had met and food he had eaten. He set those aside.
The last one was different.
The envelope was smaller. The handwriting on the front, just his name—Simon—was careful and neat, the letters slightly pressed into the paper as if written by someone who had thought about each one before putting it down.
He knew the handwriting.
He sat there holding the envelope for a long time. He could not have said how long. The lamp threw its small circle of light on the desk. The house was completely silent. Outside, somewhere far away, a night bird called once and then was quiet.
He opened it.
The letter was 2 pages long.
