I pulled out the folded blankets that had been my mother’s.

I pulled out the old photograph albums, the family christening gown, the yellowed linens.

I emptied the whole trunk onto the floorboards and found nothing, and for a moment I knelt there in the dust and thought that this too had been a dead end, one more thing I had gotten wrong.

Then I rapped my knuckles against the bottom of the empty trunk, without quite knowing why, and it answered me with a hollow sound.

A false bottom.