The cabinet had been locked for thirty-one years. He knew because he had locked it.
It sat in the corner of the back room of his shop, behind a screen, behind a curtain, behind a stack of books that had never been sold and were never meant to be sold. He had built the system around it over decades, the way coral builds a reef — accidentally at first, then with purpose, then with reverence.
The bell rang. He heard it in the front of the shop the way a man hears a phone in another room — knowing, but unhurried. He walked through.
The woman in the doorway was younger than he had expected. He had been expecting someone for thirty-one years. He had imagined them as old as he was, or older — someone with the same long memory, the same patience. This one was barely thirty.
“I think you have something of mine,” she said.
He said nothing. He had practised, in his head, what he would say. He had not practised silence, and now he found he had nothing else.
She put a photograph on the counter. It was old, and bent at the corner, and showed a young man holding a child on a beach. The young man was him. The child was not anyone he had ever known.
“That is your father,” she said. “And this is me.”
He looked at the photograph for a long time. The shop was very quiet. Behind him, somewhere in the back room, behind the screen and the curtain and the books, the cabinet waited the way it had waited for thirty-one years. He felt, suddenly and absurdly, that it was holding its breath.
He turned, and walked, and unlocked it.