“Mom, I think I’m going to head out,” Margaret said, appearing in the doorway. “I’m really tired.”
“Of course, sweetie,” Susan replied, turning with the caring mother expression she could put on in an instant. “You go get some rest. It’s been a long day.”
“Maggie, need a ride to the bus station?” Arthur asked without looking up from his phone. “Buses probably stopped running.”
“No thanks, I drove.”
She left the house, got into her car, and sat for five minutes without starting the engine, staring at the lit windows. Behind the curtains, her mother and brother were still talking, huddled over a table of papers. Then she started the car and drove back to Cleveland. Two hours on an empty highway, one thought circling in her head: Why was her mother so afraid? Why did she grab that book so violently? It was as if Margaret had been holding a loaded gun without even knowing it. She didn’t sleep that night. She lay in her small apartment, staring at the ceiling, replaying the day’s events over and over.
Her visit with her grandfather two weeks ago, his urgent whisper: “The book, Maggie, the chess book, Nimzowitsch, only you.” The way his fingers had gripped her hand with surprising strength. And his eyes—they had been clear, focused, not the eyes of a man with dementia.
“Grandpa was of sound mind,” she said aloud into the darkness. “He knew exactly what he was doing.”
Eight years as a paralegal at a construction firm had taught her to spot lies in documents, mismatched dates, suspicious signatures, numbers that didn’t add up. But now she was applying those skills to her own family, and it made her feel sick. Why did her mother get angry instead of just dismissing it? If the passbook was really just a worthless piece of junk, why snatch it with such fury? Why throw it immediately into the trash? The normal reaction would be indifference, maybe a flicker of annoyance, or a condescending smile at an old man’s eccentricities.
At three in the morning, Margaret got up, dressed, and left her apartment. Her old Chevy Malibu, which made a groaning noise on every left turn, started on the third try. Two hours on the night highway. Her headlights cut through the darkness, illuminating road markers and the silhouettes of trees. She thought about her grandfather. About him teaching her chess, about his favorite saying, about his professional accountant’s mind, which demanded an explanation for every number. A man like that wouldn’t hide a passbook in a chess book on a whim.
“Think three moves ahead,” he used to tell her. “Why did your opponent make that move? What do they want? What are they afraid of?”
What was her mother afraid of? She arrived at the lake house at five a.m., just as the sky in the east began to lighten with the cold, unforgiving light of October. The house was dark and silent. The spare key was under the third porch step—a secret she and her grandfather shared, one her mother never knew about.
She went inside, trying not to make the floorboards creak. The trash can was in the kitchen, full to the brim. Napkins, food scraps, some junk mail. Margaret knelt and began carefully sorting through the contents, feeling ridiculous. Thirty-one years old, a law degree, and here she was, digging through garbage at dawn. The passbook was near the bottom, under a crumpled newspaper and apple peels. She pulled it out, wiped it on her sleeve, and finally looked at it closely.
The cover was old and faded. But the account number inside looked strange. It was too long, in a modern format, not like the old printed numbers. And then she found the note. A tiny piece of paper, folded several times and tucked so deep into the book’s spine you’d never find it by accident. It was her grandfather’s handwriting, small and neat…
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