Nadia's checklist had nine items. She'd done seven hundred turnovers in four years, and by now the checklist was less a guide than a rhythm: blinds, baseboards, outlets, fixtures, cabinet interiors, appliance surfaces, window tracks, closet shelves, and the final walkthrough where she photographed each room for the file.
Unit 4C had been occupied for eleven years. You could tell by the curtain rod shadows — clean rectangles where the paint hadn't faded, perfectly preserved by what once hung there. The carpet had furniture ghosts: four legs of a heavy table in the dining area, a long rectangle where a couch had pressed the pile flat. Nadia had learned to read these marks the way some people read tide charts. The depth of the impression told her weight. The spacing told her taste.
The kitchen was standard. Expired coupons in a drawer, a twist-tie collection in a jar she threw away without opening, a magnet from a dentist's office that had been obsolete long enough to list a phone number with the wrong area code. The bathroom had a ring of mineral deposit inside the toilet tank and three cotton balls behind the vanity.
She worked through the bedroom. Closet: wire hangers, one wooden one, a receipt from a dry cleaner that had closed in 2019. She vacuumed the shelf and noted a water stain on the ceiling corner — maintenance, not her department, but she flagged it anyway.
The dresser was built in. The company had tried to remove them from the older units years ago but stopped when the drywall behind them turned out to be in worse shape than the furniture. So the dressers stayed, grandfathered into the fixtures like something the building had grown around.
Top drawer: empty. Second: a single button, brown, four-hole, sitting precisely in the center as though placed deliberately. She swept it into her bag.
Third drawer stuck. She wiggled it, the wood swollen along the left rail the way they did in the units facing the courtyard where the morning dew condensed on the exterior wall. Inside: envelopes. A stack of maybe thirty, held together with a rubber band that had gone brittle enough to crumble when she touched it.
The handwriting on the top envelope was careful and square. No return address. Postmarked from Dayton, the most recent stamp she could find dated 2021. She did not open it.
She picked up the stack and held it the way you hold something that might turn out to be fragile. The protocol was specific: personal property left after the vacancy date becomes waste. She had a black bag for waste. She had thrown away photo albums, tax records, a child's drawings, an anniversary card still in its cellophane. She had thrown away a man's military discharge papers once and felt nothing because feeling something would have meant stopping, and stopping would have meant the next unit started late, and the next unit starting late meant something to someone who wasn't her.
She looked at the letters. Thirty of them, from someone in Dayton to someone in 4C, spanning years. One-directional as far as she could tell — no copies of replies, no drafts, just the arriving side of a conversation she couldn't hear.
The person in 4C had kept them in the third drawer of a built-in dresser. Not displayed, not hidden. Filed in the place where you put things you don't need daily but aren't done with.
She put the letters back. Closed the drawer. Didn't lock it.
The fourth drawer was empty. She photographed the bedroom, moved on to the bathroom, and finished unit 4C at 2:47, thirteen minutes ahead of schedule. In the file she noted the water stain, the stuck drawer rail, and the built-in dresser, condition fair. She did not note the letters.
The next tenant would find them or wouldn't. The drawer stuck, which meant they might not open it, which meant the letters might sit there through another eleven years of someone else's furniture ghosts pressing into the carpet around them. Or the tenant would force the drawer and find thirty envelopes from Dayton and feel what Nadia didn't let herself feel, which was that someone had written to someone faithfully for years and the someone had kept every one and then left without them, and that leaving was its own kind of answer that didn't need her to underline it.
She started unit 4D at 2:52. Blinds, baseboards, outlets.