He was such a child. If he could get out of doing something he would, and we’d both had enough of deconstructing flat-pack furniture over the last few days. I’d already dismantled a bathroom cabinet, a rusted kitchen trolley, and a chest of drawers I’d ruined about ten years ago by gluing stickers of the Irish Olympic women’s swimming team all over the doors during a swimming phase I had. Come to think of it, that might have been the first clue I was a lesbian.

The desk was in Dad’s office, which used to be Mum’s office, and it used to be her desk. It was lopsided, the drawers stuck all the time, and there simply wasn’t space for a home office in the new flat, so we’d agreed to get rid of it. I started by pulling the drawers out of their sockets and unscrewing the handles. This required a lot of elbow grease and one screw in particular was so tight it took a bottle of WD-40 to get it unstuck. I wiped a sheen of sweat on my forehead and pulled out the last drawer. It jammed on the metal track and I sighed. If in that moment, the world saw fit to drop a giant comedy anvil on my dad’s head as karma, I would have been OK with it.

I reached, shoulder deep, into the drawer space and felt around for anything that was preventing the drawer from coming out. I couldn’t see anything, but I poked the screwdriver into the space behind the drawer a couple of times and felt something release. It came out easily then, and onto the floor fell a blue card file. I recognized it immediately. Those were the files Mum kept her client notes in.

Whenever she stopped working, out of necessity and less than willing, we’d forgotten about the files. After she moved into the home, we realized we couldn’t really hold on to them. Most of the clients she’d been seeing up until she finished working requested to have their notes sent to new therapists, but there were a lot from former clients who were off on their merry way and had no idea what was going on with Mum. We asked one of Mum’s old colleagues what we should do and she thought for confidentiality we should destroy them. This one had evidently escaped the cull.

A few months ago when Dad shredded those files I hadn’t really thought about what was in them. They didn’t interest me. It was a bunch of moldy old work papers. But sitting on the floor of my dad’s office, I was suddenly mad with curiosity about what was inside.