He turned on the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and looked at the shelves.
He was not entirely sure what he was looking for. He told himself he was not looking for anything, just moving, just doing something with his hands and body so his mind would quiet down. He pulled out an old folder, looked at it, put it back. He shifted a box of archived contracts. He moved a stack of old magazines he kept meaning to sort through.
Then, on the bottom shelf, pushed to the back behind everything else, he saw it.
A cardboard box. Brown. Slightly soft at the corners from age. No label on the outside.
He looked at it for a long moment.
He knew what was in it. Somewhere at the back of his mind, beneath all the years of deliberate forgetting, he had always known exactly where it was.
He crouched down and pulled it out. It was dusty. He wiped the top with his hand, leaving a gray smear across his palm. He carried it out of the storage room and down the hallway to his study, where he set it on the desk under the lamp and sat down.
He did not open it immediately.
He sat with his hands resting on either side of it and looked at the dull brown cardboard and breathed slowly.