The storage box had once held a kitchen appliance. Juno remembered carrying it out of the workshop with a broken handle biting into her fingers. Someone had reinforced the bottom since then with strips of brown tape.
Hettie, who had kept it beneath a shelving unit in her repair shop, apologized for the dust.
“You kept it dry,” Juno said. “That’s what mattered.”
“The other carton split when we moved the shelves. I put the loose papers in a bag inside this one. I didn’t sort them.”
“Thank you for not throwing them away.”
Hettie shrugged and moved a lamp toward the clear end of her counter. “I’ve thrown away enough useful things by mistaking them for somebody else’s rubbish.”
Eli carried the box to the counter while Kellan stood back from the repair queue. Tessa had gone ahead to arrange the meeting with Nora. Sera remained at the lodging table with the sensor and the model trace. They could help Juno without turning the whole team into an audience for every paper she opened.
Juno lifted the first layer: a torn glove, a packet of spent contacts, a notebook with a cover warped by old heat. She pressed the cover flat and recognized her own handwriting beneath a list of unpaid charges.
