PART 4
“It means this isn’t a conversation we should have standing beside a half-cut onion.”
“Then where?”
He exhaled slowly.
“My study.”
The soup was forgotten.
So was dinner.
I followed him down the hallway.
And for the first time in my life, I watched my father lock the study door behind us.
Dad walked to the old walnut bookcase behind his desk.
I had grown up around that bookcase.
As a child, I had hidden behind it during games.
As a teenager, I had borrowed books from it without permission.
There was nothing mysterious about it.
Or so I thought.
Dad removed three volumes from the second shelf.
Behind them was a small wall safe.
I stared.
“You have a safe behind Dickens?”
“Your mother’s idea.”
“Of course it was.”
For one brief second, grief softened his face.
Then he entered a code.
The safe clicked open.
Inside were several folders, an old watch, a small velvet box, and a ledger bound in faded blue leather.
My heartbeat quickened.
He took it out carefully.
“There really is a blue ledger.”
“Yes.”
“Why have I never seen it?”
“Because it belonged to your mother.”
I stared at him.
The room seemed to narrow around us.
Dad placed the ledger on the desk.
The leather was worn along the edges.
In the lower corner were my mother’s initials.
E.V.
I touched them with one finger.
“Why do you have this?”
“She gave it to me.”
“When?”
His answer came quietly.
“Three days before she died.”
I looked up.
My mother had died after complications from what we had all believed was a sudden medical crisis.
There had been no time for long goodbyes.
No dramatic final conversations.
Or at least that was what I had always believed.
“She knew?”
“She knew she was seriously ill.”
“You told me it happened suddenly.”
“The final crisis did.”
“But she knew before that.”
May you like
“For several months.”
Anger came quickly.
