Mine.
All of it mine.
And I hated that I needed to say that to myself so often now, as if ownership were a spell I had to keep repeating or the walls might listen to the wrong people.
At ten-thirty, I went to Darius’s office instead of Cathedral Park.
He had already read my mother’s note. It lay on his desk beside my grandfather’s letter, both pages held flat by a brass paperweight shaped like a ship. Darius tapped my mother’s line about the key.
“She knew there was a box,” he said.
“Apparently.”
“The question is whether she knew what was in it.”
“That makes me feel so much better.”
He ignored the sarcasm. “Your grandfather was discreet, not invisible. If there was conflict in 2017, your parents may have inferred he preserved records.”
“Inferred enough to ask for the key?”
