The Box

I searched that house for two hours like a burglar in my own family's home. Cushions lifted, drawers emptied, the underside of every shelf checked. Georgina found me kneeling by the fireplace at nearly ten at night, running my fingers along the mantel's edge.

Georgina had kept this house running since before I was born — sixty-four years old, grey curls always pinned back, a ring of keys at her hip that opened every door except, apparently, the one I needed.

"Looking for something?" she asked, and there was a stiffness in it I didn't remember from her.

"There's a locked drawer in his desk. Carved with my name. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that."

Her hands went still on the tea tray she was carrying. Just for a second. Then she was moving again, brisk, not meeting my eyes. "Your grandfather kept his own secrets, Miss Nina. Wasn't my place to ask."

"That's not a no."

"It's the only answer I've got." And she left the room faster than a woman her age should have been able to.

I went back to the study furious and half-convinced I was chasing nothing. I sat in his reading chair — worn green leather, the one he died in, technically, though nobody said that part out loud — and let my head fall back against it, exhausted.

That's when my hand brushed something taped beneath the armrest. A small brass key, cold, pressed flat against the underside where thirty years of his hands had never once reached.

It fit the drawer on the first try.

Inside wasn't money, or a second will, or anything Callum would have wanted to see. It was a metal box, the kind you'd keep fishing tackle in, rusted faintly at the hinges. I lifted the lid.

Letters. A dozen of them at least, tied together with a ribbon gone brittle and grey with age, each envelope addressed in my grandfather's unmistakable slanted handwriting.

Not one of them was addressed to my grandmother.

Every single envelope said the same name.

To Emory.