The Light Over London(53)

She fumbled a little, sending Granddad’s dog tags jingling on the key ring as she stuck the brass key in the bottom padlock. It unlocked with a gentle click. The stainless steel one gave just as easily.

Unthreading the locks from their hooks, she reached down and gave the heavy metal gate a tug upward. It moved about four inches, but then stuck.

“Here, let me,” Liam said, bending down to grip the handle on the opposite bottom corner. Together they pulled, and the rolling gate revealed a lifetime of memories.

Cara flicked the light on in the wide locker, and the overhead fluorescent bulbs flashed once and then filled the space with harsh light. The movers had left sheets covering most of the larger pieces, which now rose up like ghosts. Plastic bins packed with dishes, utensils, and bric-a-brac lined one wall, while rolled-up rugs wrapped in sheet plastic leaned opposite them.

“Where do we start?” asked Liam, shoving a hand through his hair as he tried to take in the huge task of finding one safe in the mess of another family’s possessions.

“My parents’ things are all in the back. We might have to move items around a bit to get to them.”

“How big is the safe?” he asked. She held up a hand to her waist. “You’re kidding.”

She shook her head. “Dad’s great-uncle was a banker, and the safe came down through the family to him. No one wanted to inherit it because it meant having to move it. It became a sort of family joke. Dad made a snug on the ground floor of our house his study because he didn’t want to make the movers bring the safe upstairs.”

“All right then,” said Liam. “Shall we?”

She pulled the first sheet off and winced.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She pointed to the quilted headboard she’d picked out with Simon. “My old bed. I have no idea why I still have it.” Neither of them had wanted to keep it after the divorce. It was too painful a reminder of what their lives had once been, but still, she’d wound up with it.

The next sheet revealed a pair of bookcases; the third, a pair of round side tables that had once flanked the drawing room sofa Gran had given her for her twenty-eighth birthday.

“Can you help me shift these a little?” she asked, resting a hand on one of the twin tables.

“I can do one better,” said Liam. “I can stack them.”

It took them a half hour of lifting, moving, stacking, nudging, and occasionally cursing as they made a pathway to the back of the storage unit. Midway through, she shrugged off her puffy vest and Liam pulled his fleece quarter zip over his head. The sweat on the back of her neck was a good sign. The physicality of today kept her mind occupied, didn’t give her time to think.

“This is good,” said Liam, sitting down in one of the straight-backed chairs that had made up her parents’ dining room set.

Regency chestnut dining chairs, set of eight. Paired with chestnut table with two leaves and brass fixtures. British. 1821.

“We’re to the back. Now we just have to decide whether to go right or left,” he said, casting a weary gaze around.

“Regretting this?” she asked, more to distract herself than anything else. Her thoughts had begun to creep in the moment they’d stopped, and she felt her past pressing down on her.

He shook his head. “Not even a bit. How else would I have learned you used to pretend the dining table was a cave when your parents had dinner parties?”

She smiled weakly. “You could be doing other things with your Sunday.”

He shrugged. “So could you. And remember, I promised Iris I would come with you. I have a feeling it would be best not to cross your gran.”

“You’re probably right,” she said.

“Sit down and have a rest,” he said, moving one of the dining chairs.

But she couldn’t stop. Instead, she tugged on a sheet next to her. It slid to the floor and revealed her great-great-uncle’s heavy black iron safe.

“Is that it?” Liam asked.

She laid a hand on the cool metal, her memory flashing to all the times she’d seen it behind her father’s desk when she’d brought him a cup of tea or nagged him for permission to visit a friend Mum didn’t quite approve of. “This is it.”

“Do you have the combination?” he asked, eyeing the pair of tumblers and the large steel handle on the door.

She opened the notes app on her phone and scrolled until she found the combination she’d stored there on her father’s instructions years ago. It took her two tries—the top tumbler was stiff—and when she went to open the safe, the handle hardly budged. She pushed down hard, but all the metal did was bite into her skin.

“Would you mind?” she asked, gesturing to the handle.

As Liam’s arm brushed hers, she shivered and then hugged her waist as she watched him struggle to open the safe. It was a strangely old-fashioned thing, asking a man to use his brute strength to help her open something. She’d been on her own for so long—longer than she’d been divorced, really, if she thought of how little she and Simon had seen each other in the last year of their marriage. She didn’t mind being her own savior from time to time if it meant independence, but she found that she also didn’t mind accepting Liam’s help.

He grunted and threw his body weight onto the handle. There was a click, and he shuffled to the side between a bookcase and a tower of cardboard boxes.