My family laughed at my military rank, called me an embarrassment, and looked almost relieved when two police officers arrived to arrest me.

Chapter 17

Samuel came back with coffee he had clearly made himself, using the machine in the corner, because the receptionist’s coffee had been that bad.

“Did she say anything about what we should do with the property?” I asked.

“No.”

“She didn’t care?”

“She cared a great deal.”

“Then why not tell us?”

Samuel sat down and regarded me over the rim of his cup.

“Because Rosalind believed advice was useful only until a person became old enough to make their own mistakes,” he said. “She considered unsolicited instructions to be a form of theft.”

“That’s an interesting position for a woman who just left us four sealed letters.”

“She did not consider those instructions,” Samuel said. “She considered those a conversation she was finally willing to have.”

I looked down at the file.

There was one more thing I needed.

“Mr. Levin. The schedule at the back of the trust lists five sealed items. Four in 2016. One more in 2021.”

Samuel’s eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch.

“You read the schedule.”

“I read all of it.”

He looked at me with something that might have been approval.

“That is more than your father has done in ten years.”

“Who’s the fifth for?”

He didn’t answer immediately. He reached into the folder and took out an envelope that was slightly larger than the others, and worn differently at the corners, as though it had been handled more.

“There is one additional letter,” he said. “It is addressed to your father, and it was deposited in 2021.”

“Five years after the first four.”

“Yes.”

“Does he know it exists?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because the trust instructed me to deliver it with the others,” Samuel said, “and your grandmother wrote a separate instruction, in her own hand, in 2021, which is filed at the back of this folder and which I have read approximately four hundred times.”

“What does it say?”

Samuel turned the folder around so I could read it.

One line, in my grandmother’s small slanted hand, dated the twenty-third of March, 2021.

Samuel — if he asks about Thomas, give him this. If he doesn’t ask, don’t.

I read it.

Then I read it again.

“She knew he might never ask,” I said.

“She thought it was likely.”

“And she was willing to let him never know.”

“She was.”

I looked at the envelope in his hand. My father’s name on it. Five years old and never delivered, sitting in a folder in Lakewood while my father drove to work every morning and ran a printing shop into the ground and did not ask.

“That’s cruel,” Tiffany said.

“Your grandmother didn’t see it that way.”

“How else can you see it?”

Samuel considered the question seriously. That was the thing about him—he did not defend the dead reflexively.

“She believed a gift that has to be forced is not a gift,” he said. “She believed your father had spent his life being told what he ought to do, and that this was the one thing she would not tell him.”

“So she set a trap.”

“No.” Samuel shook his head. “She left a door. Traps close behind you. Doors stay open and let you decide whether to walk through.”

Tiffany sat back.

“That’s the most lawyer thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I’ve had practice,” Samuel said.

I looked at the clock on the wall—an actual clock, brass, ticking.

“What happens if he never asks?”

“Then the letter returns to me, and I keep it until I die, and then it goes to whatever the county does with abandoned files.” Samuel said it without any particular weight. “I would prefer that not happen.”

“So would I.”

I stood up.

Tiffany looked at me. “What are you doing?”

“Going home.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Nora—”

“Tiffany.” I picked up her envelope and handed it to her, and then Dad’s and Mom’s. “Samuel’s right. She left doors.”

“They’re going to be difficult.”

“Yes.”

“Mom especially.”

“Yes.”

“You know she’ll do the thing where she starts cleaning the kitchen.”

“I know.”

“You know Dad will go and stand in the garage for an hour and then come back and say something about the weather.”

“I know.”

“So what’s the plan?”

I looked at her.

“The plan,” I said, “is that we walk in, we put two envelopes on the table, and we don’t leave until somebody opens one.”

Tiffany stared at me for a second.

Then she picked up her keys.

“Fine,” she said. “But I’m driving. You drive like a person with somewhere to be.”

“I do have somewhere to be.”

“That’s what makes it so awful.”