Page 79 of The Woman with the Handcuffs

“Are there any close to here?”

“Just one, yeah.”

“Did you find any keys? We could go look.”

“I wasn’t looking for Master keys. Do you have your father’s keyring on you?”

I fished it out of my bag and handed it over. “Is that one?”

“No. But this is to a safe. Which I would assume is around here somewhere.”

We spread out then, scouring every inch of the house before making our way down into the basement.

It was almost haunting how domestic the place felt. There were plastic storage totes marked with masking tape and my father’s awful chicken scratch. Laundry detergent sat on top of the dryer. There was a basket of dirty clothes next to the washer. And a collection of women’s bras hanging on the line.

Clothes in the closet.

Bras on the line.

It felt more like she was living there than just staying. I’d maybe kept a few items in ex-boyfriends’ places before. But I didn’t hang out my bras to dry. Though maybe that was just me and my young relationships. Maybe more mature couples did things differently.

“Got it. He hid this thing well.”

Turning, I found the source of the scraping I’d heard. Gav was hidden behind a metal storage cabinet he’d moved away from the wall.

My father had the receipts for secret storage units and a secret safe hidden in his secret house.

My head felt like it was spinning as I walked on numb legs over to where Gav was waiting for me before unlocking the large in-wall safe.

If he was thinking anything in particular, he wasn’t sharing it with me as he pulled the door open.

“Is that a gun? A real gun?”

Gav used one of my father’s keys to pick the gun up by the trigger guard.

“Yeah, that’s a real gun.”

My stomach lurched.

I mean, it wasn’t that I thought it was impossible for my father to own a gun. He believed in them. He just wasn’t legally allowed to drive with one across state lines, so he’d never had one before.

“Anything else?” I asked as he put the gun down and went back to the safe.

“The deed to the house. Paperwork for life insurance. Ammunition. And, yep, Master keys.” He handed those to me. “What do you want to do with the rest of this?”

“Leave it here for now.”

So that was what we did.

And I felt like my legs were lead as we walked down the block to wait for our next ride-share to take us to the storage unit.

“You okay?” Gav asked, giving my leg a squeeze. “We can just go home if you’ve had enough for one day.”

“If there’s anything else to find out, I kind of want the shock of it all over with,” I told him, feeling a sort of numbness settling in like I always did when there was too much to process and no way to work through it at the moment.

“Okay,” he agreed.

With that, we plugged in the number to the unit and made our way inside one of the buildings, walking past dozens of blue garage doors before we made it to my father’s unit.