Chapter 1: The Box He Left Only For Me
My name is Patricia, and I married my husband, Frank, eleven years ago, three years after his first wife passed away.
His two adult children, Brad and Stephanie, made their opinion of me clear from the very first Thanksgiving.
"She's just here for the house," Stephanie said once, not even bothering to lower her voice when I was standing in the next room.
Frank's house, the one he'd built with his first wife decades earlier, sat on four acres and was worth more than I made in five years combined.
For eleven years, I heard some version of that sentence at every family gathering.
I stopped correcting them after the third year.
It never made a difference.
Frank passed away last month, quietly, in his sleep, after a long battle with his heart.
At the funeral, Brad and Stephanie stood together near the casket, accepting condolences, barely acknowledging me except for a stiff nod.
A week later, Frank's attorney, Mr.
Delgado, called and asked me to come into his office alone, without the children present.
I sat down across from his desk, and he reached into a drawer and pulled out a small metal box, sealed with an old brass lock.
"Frank came to see me four months before he passed," he said, sliding it across the desk toward me.
"He was very specific about how this was handled, and who was allowed to be in the room when you opened it."
I looked down at the box, my hands hovering just above the lid.
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What was inside that box — and did Brad and Stephanie ever find out?
Comment "NEXT" if you want Part 2.
