YARA I don’t sleep much that night.
By morning I’ve decided I need to see something, anything, that might explain Mrs.
Ashford’s comment and the way my parents reacted to it.
So when Beau leaves for the bank on a Tuesday morning and Nola takes Yasmin into town for a dress fitting, and the house empties out around me for a few rare hours, I go back to the study.
I don’t have a plan, exactly.
I’m not going to touch the locked drawer, I’ve already decided that much, some part of me still isn’t ready to know what’s behind it.
But there are other drawers in that desk, unlocked ones, ordinary ones, and I tell myself I’m not snooping so much as looking for a place to sit and think.
The study is quiet in the daytime in a way it never is at night, sunlight coming in low and gold through the one high window, dust turning slow in the air.
I sit in my usual chair, the one that’s always just been mine, and let my eyes wander the desk the way they wandered it that evening with Beau, except now there’s no one here to catch me looking.
The top drawer holds nothing but pens and a magnifying glass and old receipts.
The second holds ledgers I don’t recognize, columns of names and figures in Beau’s careful hand.
One name stops me cold.
Callahan.
Written twice, both times followed by numbers, nothing else, no explanation of who or what.
I don’t know the name, but something about seeing it there in my father’s handwriting makes my throat go tight.
I close the drawer before I can talk myself into reading the rest.
It’s the third drawer, the shallow one built for stationery, where I find it.
A single envelope, tucked beneath a stack of blank paper like someone wanted it out of sight but couldn’t quite make themselves lock it away with the photograph.
No postmark.
No stamp.
Just my father’s name written across the front in handwriting I don’t recognize, cramped and urgent.
I open it.
The letter inside is short, and reading it, I understand why.
I trusted your family.
Your family destroyed me.
Someone has to answer for it.
That’s all.
No greeting.
No signature beyond a single initial at the bottom, a looping, angry C that presses hard enough into the paper that I can feel the shape of it on the back of the page when I run my thumb over it.
A single letter shouldn’t mean anything to me.
But the ledger surfaces in my mind unbidden, that same name written twice in Beau’s careful hand, and something in my chest goes tight before I can even tell myself it’s probably nothing.
I sit very still for a moment, the letter held loose between my fingers, and something about it makes the small hairs on my arms lift, the same wrongness I felt crouched over the dead bird on the riverbank, the same wrongness I felt with Yasmin’s hand on my sleeve.
I bring the paper closer without deciding to, the way you lean toward a sound you’re not sure you actually heard.
There’s something in it, underneath the ink and the paper itself – not a scent, not quite a feeling, but something in between.
Old and sharp and desperate.
My fingertips go numb where they touch the page, and my chest tightens like I’m the one who can’t breathe.
Like whoever wrote these words poured something of themselves into the paper along with the ink, and it’s still here, still trapped, waiting for someone to finally notice.
I don’t have the first idea what I’m sensing, or why paper should feel like it’s humming faintly under my fingers, or why my chest goes tight and my throat goes thick reading four sentences from a stranger.
I just know that whoever wrote this letter was in more pain than four sentences should be able to hold, and somehow, impossibly, some small piece of that pain is still here, has survived however many years since this was written, waiting inside the fold of the paper for someone to finally read it right.
I put it back exactly where I found it, beneath the stack of blank paper, and close the drawer, and sit there a long time with my hands in my lap, trying to decide what I just touched.
I don’t get an answer that day.
But I don’t stop thinking about it either, and that night, long after the house has gone quiet and I should be asleep, I hear Beau’s voice.
It’s coming from the study, low, pitched the way a voice gets when a person thinks no one else in the house is still awake to hear it.
I’m on my way back from the kitchen, a glass of water in my hand, and I stop dead in the hallway outside the study door, which isn’t quite shut all the way.
“He’s dead, Nola,” Beau is saying, and something in the shape of those words freezes me in place.
“The Callahan boy is dead.” A pause.
I can’t hear Nola’s half of it, wherever she is, on some upstairs extension probably, her voice too far away to carry.
But I can hear Beau breathing on the other end of the silence, ragged, like a man holding something heavy that’s about to slip out of his hands.
“And if anyone finds out why – ” He doesn’t finish the sentence.
I stand frozen in the hallway, water glass sweating cold against my palm, and the silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in this house.
Give me more motivation!