Standing in front of it now, a grown woman of thirty-five with my mother in a hospital bed across town, I felt the old fear rise in me, and underneath it, for the first time, an adult anger.

This was my family’s house.

I had a right to know what was in it.

The padlock was rusted but solid.

I went to the garage, found a bolt cutter on my father’s old pegboard — my father, Emmerson, dead these twenty-six years — and I cut the lock off with my own hands.

I stood there a moment with the severed lock in my palm, and I felt something I had not felt in that house since I was small: the specific dread of doing a forbidden thing under my mother’s roof.