The first two days alone were supposed to be blissful, but the silence was deafening. I spent the time scrubbing floors and rearranging furniture to erase any trace of them. I wanted the house to feel like it did when I was a kid, back when it was just me and Dad before the cancer took my mom and before Martha arrived five years ago.
On the second evening, I finally tackled the master bedroom, which Martha had occupied. I pulled the heavy oak bed frame away from the wall to vacuum the dust bunnies, and that’s when I saw it.
My heart did a slow, heavy roll in my chest. I sat down on the floor, the vacuum cleaner still humming loudly in the middle of the room, and pulled the box into my lap. I hadn’t seen this box in years; it was the one Dad used to keep his “treasures” in when I was a little girl.
I pried the lid open, expecting to find old photos or perhaps some jewelry he had forgotten to put in the will. Instead, the box was stuffed with envelopes. Dozens of them.
They weren’t letters from my father to me, though. They were bank statements, legal documents, and a thick, hand-written journal. I picked up the journal first, my fingers trembling. The first entry was dated four years ago, just a few months after Martha and Dad got married.
As I read, the world around me seemed to tilt. My father wrote about his second diagnosis—the one he never told me about. He wrote about how the medical bills were stripping him of everything he had saved.
He described the terror of knowing he would leave me with nothing but debt if he didn’t find a way to protect the house. Then, I saw Martha’s name. He wrote about how she had taken her entire inheritance from her own parents’ passing and used it to pay off the back taxes and the secret second mortgage he had taken out for his treatments.
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