Clearer.
I made tea and did not drink it.
Then I opened Frank’s old files.
Frank had kept papers the way some people keep photographs.
Everything labelled.
Everything folded.
Receipts for repairs, mortgage statements, insurance letters, bank documents, solicitor correspondence from years before.
I went through them slowly at the dining table while the kettle cooled behind me.
Then I remembered Daniel’s storage box in the loft.
He had left it there years earlier when he and Melissa moved into their own place.
Old paperwork, university bits, computer cables, the kind of clutter adult children abandon because they assume their parents’ houses are free storage forever.
