The lockbox was on the floor of my bedroom at three in the morning with its latch bent open and my passport gone. I had bought the lockbox specifically for the passport and the letter of acceptance and the wire transfer confirmation for the orientation deposit. I had bought it because I understood, in the way that youngest children in complicated families understand things, that nothing I considered important was entirely safe in that house, and that the best protection available to me was a small metal container with a combination lock.
The box had cost twenty-two dollars at a hardware store three blocks from campus, and I had chosen the combination from a sequence of numbers that had no significance to anyone in my family. None of that had mattered. Someone had pried the latch with a flathead screwdriver, or something like one, and the metal had given way because twenty-two dollars does not buy very much in the way of physical security.
My birth certificate was still in the box. My social security card was still there. My immunization records were still there.
Only the passport was missing, which told me everything I needed to know about why the box had been opened in the first place. It wasn’t a random theft. It was a targeted one.
I sat on the floor of my room for maybe ninety seconds, just breathing, allowing the reality of the situation to settle into my understanding without letting the panic that was building in my chest take over my thinking. The Stanton Global Fellowship orientation was in London in ninety-six hours. My flight departed in seventy-two.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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