I got it down and I put it on the kitchen table and I did not open it for about forty minutes, and then I did, obviously, because I had already opened the letter and there is no honest version of me that stops at the tape.
Inside the bag was a plastic storage box, the kind with clips. Inside that:
A passport, US, in the name Karen Elise Solomon, valid until 2026. The photograph matched the community-page post.
A birth certificate and a social security card, in a paper wallet.
Money. Bank-strapped bills in a freezer bag, hundreds and fifties, and I did not count it that night because I did not want to touch it. I counted it later. Eleven thousand three hundred dollars.
A phone, an old one, dead, with no case.
Three flash drives in a sandwich bag.
And a notebook. A cheap spiral one, about half used.
The notebook is the thing. Everything else in that box could be a hundred stories. The notebook is only one.
It was dates.
Every entry was a date and a time and then two or three lines, and it started in March 2016 and ran to August 2019, and there were, I counted, two hundred and forty-one of them.
I’m going to give three, and I have changed nothing except the surname, which I’ve removed everywhere.
4/2/16, 11pm. Kitchen. Grabbed my wrist when I said I was tired. Let go when I said ow. Said I was being dramatic. Left mark, gone by Monday.
11/9/17, evening. Took keys. Said I could have them when I “calmed down”. Two hours. I was calm the entire time.
6/12/19, 2am. Woke me up to continue. Would not let me leave the room. 40 mins. No contact. Told me if I called anyone he would say I hit him first and that they believe the man who calls first.
That’s the notebook. Two hundred and forty-one of those, in a spiral pad, in handwriting that gets smaller and faster over three and a half years.
There is no name in it anywhere. Not once. She never wrote his name down, in two hundred and forty-one entries, and I understood why about four entries in and it made me put the book down and go and stand at the window.
The last entry is dated 31 August 2019.
It is not like the others. It is four words and it is the only entry with no time on it.
Ok. I’m going to.
Karen Solomon was reported missing three weeks later.
I sat in that kitchen until about four in the morning and I did the thing you do, which is build the two stories and hold them side by side.
Story one. A woman documented three and a half years of abuse, decided at the end of August to leave, and was killed for it. She never got out. The box in the ceiling is a file she assembled to use and never got to use, and a passport she never got to travel on, and money she never got to spend, and it has been eighteen inches above the closet in this apartment for five years while her mother in Warwick called the police forty times.
Story two. A woman documented three and a half years of abuse, decided at the end of August to leave, and left. Completely. In the only way that actually works against someone who will look for you.
And I could not choose. Every single thing in that box supports both, and I want to walk through why, because I spent four days on it and it matters for what happened next.
The passport says she didn’t run — you don’t leave without your passport. Except that a passport in your name is a thing that gets used to find you, and you cannot board an international flight or open an account without generating a record, and somebody genuinely disappearing inside the United States may be safer with no documents at all than with hers.
The money says she didn’t run — eleven thousand dollars is what you run with. Except that this was clearly cash withdrawn slowly over a long period, and if you are leaving a man who checks your accounts, cash you have been skimming for two years is exactly what you cannot be caught having, and you might well cache it somewhere and come back for it, and then find you can’t come back for it.
The notebook says both. It says she was in danger, which supports story one. It says she had a plan careful enough to keep a three-year contemporaneous record and hide it in a ceiling void, which supports story two.
And Ok. I’m going to. is either the last thing a woman wrote before she was killed, or the first thing she wrote as somebody else.
I called the police on the Monday.
I want to be clear that I did. I have been asked, since, why I didn’t, by people who had heard a version of this story that skipped it, and the answer is that I did, immediately, the first working day.
I told them I had found a box in the ceiling of an apartment belonging to a woman reported missing in 2019, that it contained identity documents and cash and a notebook documenting domestic violence, and that I would bring it in or they could come and get it.
They came on the Wednesday. Two of them. They took the box, and the bag, and the tape, and they gave me a property receipt with a case number on it, and they were professional and unhurried and asked me twice whether I had touched the flash drives.
And then, from that point, for eleven weeks, absolutely nothing happened at all.