I put on a smile. “Hi, I’m here for a friend—Frank Mitchell?” He doesn’t blink, doesn’t give any reaction to the name. “He’s drowning in stuff, honestly drowning. Total packrat and just can’t bring himself to toss any damn thing.”

“That’s why we’re here,” he says. I can’t tell if he’s making a joke or not.

“He can hardly find his couch nowadays, and of course he’s gone and lost the key to his unit.” I’m rambling and I know it. Less is more. “So I offered to come down and get a replacement, maybe take some stuff off his hands.”

He shakes his head. “Can’t let no one in besides the owner. He’ll have to come down here himself, give ID and his account number and put in for a new key.”

“That’s just exactly what I told him,” I say, making a big show of amazement, as if we’ve arrived together at the solution to a major physics problem. “He gave me his account number and told me to give it a shot anyway. I have his number, too—you can call him if you want.”

He looks at the phone on his desk as if it’s a dead mouse he hasn’t yet cleared away. I hold my breath. Finally, he just shakes his head. “You said you got the account number?”

I recite it to him. He turns to the ancient computer on his desk and spends a few labored minutes trying to get it to do whatever he needs it to do. Then, with a heavy sigh, he stands and disappears into the back office, returning a few seconds later with a key. But before I can grab it from the counter, he nudges a heavy leather-bound security log in my direction.

“Sign, date, and print your name clear,” he says. “Name of the unit owner, too.”

Not until then do I fully register the cameras winking at us from the ceiling. And for a split second, I have a feeling like waking up abruptly from a dream and seeing the real world rush at you.

But what rushes at me now is the gravity of what I’m doing. I don’t remember enough of criminal law code to know exactly what law I’m breaking—false pretenses, maybe, or larceny-by-trick, but only if I remove something—but either way, a violation of this size could get me disbarred.

I nearly leave the key where it is. I nearly mumble an excuse, turn, and hurry back to the car.

But I don’t. I scrawl a fake name into the ledger. The key—a new one—is very small and extremely light. Cheap keys for cheap locks for a cheap storage facility filled with cheap belongings. A no-man’s land of possessions: sufficiently disposable to be locked away, but too dearly loved, or at least too familiar, to be abandoned. I wonder how many storage rooms are built out of broken hearts and broken relationships, dead fathers and brothers and wives. I also wonder how many of them are just meth labs.