What's Left Unsaid: A Novel by Emily Bleeker

Author:Emily Bleeker [Bleeker, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2021-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

Hannah looked out over the landscape of the archive room, hands on her hips. In three weeks, she’d made her way through nearly two-thirds of the filing cabinets, and it showed. Last week, Monty started moving the metal storage units out once their contents were fully scanned. The room was beginning to feel cavernous in comparison to when she’d taken her first tentative steps into the chaotic basement.

When she’d started the assignment twenty days earlier, it’d seemed like a purgatory equal to one of Dante’s seven terraces. But there was a fascinating satisfaction to recording history—making it permanent in some way. And with each drawer she completed, the motivation to continue had begun to escalate beyond the desire to find more of Evelyn’s story.

Hannah made her way back to her portable workstation, which included a stool, notebook, pencil, and a few other supplies. She opened another drawer, almost finished with her second row of cabinets that week. The large pink Post-it pad sat by her side. As soon as she cleared out this drawer, Hannah would write Storage on one of the sticky notes and place it on top of the unit. The other seven filing cabinets in the row were similarly marked. Every time another line of metal towers disappeared, Hannah felt a sense of satisfaction but with an aftertaste of anxiety. It’d been an eternity since she’d opened a filing cabinet and known a piece of Evelyn’s story was inside.

Usually, Hannah could sense when a lead related to her was close. She wasn’t all New Agey, but there was an energy to a story that she could zero in on like a sixth sense.

But she hadn’t felt so much as a goose bump since her trip to Memphis. There had been a few leads that came out of her journey to the university and Maggie’s research skills, but most of them were dead ends. One would entail an overnight trip to Kentucky to look into a possible link to Harry’s life. She’d go check it out after the Thanksgiving holiday, hopeful that it was the same Harry she’d been pursuing.

Thanksgiving. More time off from work, which normally she’d be happy for, but not this year, when it meant less time digging for answers and more time hanging out at Mamaw’s house with her mom, who was coming to visit after turkey day, which would be spent in California with Brody and his two boys. Who could blame her? Brody and his wife had invited Hannah to join them, but there was no way she’d leave Mamaw alone, even though her grandmother was finally mobile enough to navigate her house with her walker now.

Hannah hauled out a stack of files and took them over to the computer. She shuffled through them quickly, having gotten pretty good at scanning a document with her eyes and knowing if it was from Evelyn. She was looking for the thin, cheap typewriter paper. It would likely be several pages long, single-spaced, typed, and written in a clear, first-person narrative.

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