Chapter 5: The Warning
I stared at the screen.
Diane saw my face before I could say anything.
"What?"
I turned the phone around so she could read it.
She read it twice.
"Unknown number?"
"Yes."
Thomas leaned across.
He read it.
His expression didn't change — but his hand, resting on the table, closed slowly into a fist.
"Someone knows we found the box," I said.
"Someone's been watching," Diane said.
"Or someone's been waiting for this moment."
Thomas picked up his phone and tried his mother again.
Voicemail.
He tried the landline at his parents' house.
It rang out.
"I'm going over there," he said, and stood up.
"Thomas—" I started.
"She's my mother, Sarah.
Whatever this is, I need to hear it from her directly."
I didn't argue.
But I picked up my own keys.
"Then I'm coming with you."
He looked at me for a moment, then nodded.
Diane stayed behind to lock up.
She squeezed my arm at the door.
"Call me the minute you know something."
The drive to his parents' house took eighteen minutes.
Thomas didn't speak.
I watched his hands on the wheel — steady, controlled, the way they always were when he was keeping something in.
We pulled into the driveway.
Gerald's car was there.
Eleanor's was not.
Thomas rang the bell.
Gerald answered within seconds, as if he'd been standing near the door.
He looked older than he had that morning.
Or maybe I was just seeing him differently now.
"Come in," he said.
The living room was tidy, the way it always was.
A pot of tea on the side table.
Two cups.
He'd been expecting us.
"Where is she?" Thomas said.
"She went to see Father Donnelly," Gerald said.
"At the church.
She goes when she needs to think."
"Dad." Thomas sat down across from him.
"Tell me what you know."
Gerald wrapped both hands around his tea.
He looked at the cup for a long moment.
"The account was opened eleven years ago," he said.
"Before you and Sarah were married."
I went very still.
"By whom?" Thomas said.
"By your brother."
The room shifted.
Thomas had a brother.
Had.
Daniel had died in a car accident fourteen years ago, two years before Thomas and I met.
I knew the outline — a wet road, a bend taken too fast, a loss the family had never fully spoken about.
Thomas kept one photograph of him on his desk.
He never talked about it, and I had learned not to ask.
"Daniel opened an account in my name?" Thomas said.
His voice was completely flat.
"He opened it in both your names," Gerald said.
"Joint.
He was seventeen.
You were twenty-two.
He idolized you.
He wanted to save money — he had some plan, some idea about starting a business together one day." Gerald's hands tightened around the cup.
"He put in whatever he could from his part-time work.
A few hundred here and there.
When he died, the account went dormant."
"Then where did forty-two thousand dollars come from?" Thomas said.
Gerald set his cup down.
"Three years ago," he said, "someone started making deposits into it again."
Thomas leaned forward.
"Who?"
Gerald looked at me.
Not at Thomas.
At me.
"We don't know," he said.
"That's what frightened Eleanor.
That's why she documented everything.
She found out about the account by accident — an old statement that came to our address.
She didn't tell you because she didn't know what it meant.
She was afraid that if she asked the wrong questions, she'd find out something she couldn't take back."
"Something about me," Thomas said quietly.
"Or something about someone close to you," Gerald said.
He was still looking at me.
The tea sat cooling between us.
Outside, a car turned into the street.
We all heard it.
None of us moved until it passed.
"The text message," I said.
"Someone sent me a message this morning.
Four words.
*Don't let him look.*"
Gerald's face changed.
"What number?" he said.
I showed him the screen.
He looked at it for a long time.
May you like
Then he set my phone gently on the table and folded his hands.
"That's Daniel's old number," he said.
