“Oh, that’s an old storage unit,” he said casually. “It’s empty. I’ve just been meaning to cancel it.”
That answer should have satisfied me. Instead, it made me suspicious.
Because if it was truly empty, why keep paying for it for 14 years?
“Fourteen years?” I asked.
Mark finally looked at me. “Lena, it’s nothing.”
“You’ve been paying almost $90 a month for nothing?”
“I said I forgot.”
“You don’t forget anything.”
He sighed. “Can we not do this tonight?”
I stared at him, waiting for more, but he walked out of the kitchen as if I had asked about a broken toaster.
A few weeks later, the charge appeared again.
This time, I couldn’t let it go.
While my husband was away on a business trip, I searched through old paperwork and eventually found the storage facility’s address and unit number.
My hands shook when I found the receipt.
Unit 214.
There was a key taped behind it.
The place was on the outskirts of town. Rows and rows of metal doors stretched across the property.
I parked near a small office building by the entrance and sat in my car for a moment, staring through the windshield. Part of me wanted to turn around and go home.
Instead, I forced myself out of the car and walked inside.
A gray-haired man sat behind the reception desk. He looked up when I entered.
“Can I help you?”
I explained that I was looking for a storage unit rented by my husband and showed him the paperwork I had found.
The manager checked the records, then smiled and said, “Wow. Unit 214. Your husband has had that one for a very long time.”
