Spring Cleaning

The storage unit smelled of dust and cardboard. Rosa had been putting it off for ten years, paying the monthly fee rather than facing whatever was inside. When the facility announced it was closing, she had no choice.

Most of it was rubbish. Broken lamps, ugly vases, old tax returns. But at the back, in a shoebox tied with string, she found the photographs.

The summer she was twenty-nine. A farmhouse in Provence, a borrowed bicycle, a man called Luc with paint on his hands and a laugh that carried across fields. Picture after picture of him: squinting in the sun, asleep in a hammock, kissing her on a stone wall with the lavender behind them. She had left at the end of that summer for a job she thought she wanted. She had never written.

On the back of the last photo, in his scrawl, was a phone number.

It took her three days to dial it.

He answered on the fourth ring. His voice was older, rougher, unmistakable.

'Rosa,' he said, before she had even finished her name. 'I wondered if you would ever call.'

He was coming to the city for an exhibition the following month. They met at the gallery. He had grey in his beard and the same paint under his nails, and he kissed her cheek, then, slowly, her mouth.

They spent the night at her flat surrounded by the photographs, laughing at the people they used to be and making new memories to replace the old. Some boxes, she decided, were worth opening.