Hotel management certificates. A commendation from a chain I had never heard of for something called guest recovery. Her citizenship papers. A photograph of her at about my age in a lobby somewhere with her arms folded, looking at the camera like it owed her money.

And the closing folder on the house. Nineteen ninety-eight. Her name alone on every page, and a handwritten sheet of paper, in Polish and English side by side, where she had worked out over eleven lines whether she could afford it.

She could not, quite. She had bought it anyway, at forty-four, single, in a currency she had not been born speaking.

Hannah found the last thing, in the bottom of the fourth box, in an envelope with my name on it.

It was a savings passbook. Opened in 1991, the year after I was born. Deposits of ten and twenty dollars, monthly, for eight years, in her handwriting, and then bigger ones, and then nothing after 2003.

Two thousand and eleven dollars, closed out in March of 2003.