Tuesdays Tales Picture Prompt - Chest

It's time for Tuesday's Tales again.  Would someone please slow down the clock, I can't belive how time is flying by!
It's Picture Prompt week this week and today's prompt is chest.  My story today is a stand-alone story.  I may expand it one day, but not right now.
Thank you for coming by.

A single beam of sunlight from the attic window shone on the chest.  She’d thought it was a legend. Not real, and yet there it sat right in front of her in the middle of the attic room.

Nut brown, and faded in places, where, she thought, the sun had caught it over the years. Its domed lid with the obligatory metal bands as did the base of the chest reminded her of something out of a child’s pirate’s story.

Every night her father—adoptive father—wove wonderful stories around a treasure chest.  “One day, you’ll find your own treasure chest,” he’d told her one night.  Something, a look in his eyes, seared the comments into her memory. And now, years later, she sat in front of a nut brown treasure chest.

Like a magnate it drew her across the room.  Of course it would be locked and she didn’t have a key. Still, she crossed the room and sat on the floor in front of the chest. 

She reached out and laid her hand on the lid.  It came alive under her touch, pulsed beneath her fingers. Shock forced her back.  A box didn’t pulse, not even when it looked like a treasure chest.  Tentatively, she reached out again.  Steady as a heartbeat, the pulse grew stronger.

Before she changed her mind she grasped the lid and lifted.

It opened, and mesmerised she gazed at a white-lace baby’s dress, and white knitted cap. Beneath it a birth certificate…  Letters, lots of them; and pictures.

The top one from her adoptive parents. The rest were a mixture from her birth, and adopted parents. She sifted through them.

Treasure indeed, and worth more, more than all the gold doubloons and secret maps in the world.  These were part of her—

Family.