All those
years.
Two women.
One ring.
One impossible family.
“What does this have to do with the bank?”
Samuel looked at Daniel.
“The initials are the password.”
Daniel laughed once, without humor.
“You knew the entire time?”
“I knew the password. I didn’t have the key.”
“What is inside?”
Samuel’s face changed.
For the first time, I saw fear.
“Letters.”
Daniel frowned.
“Letters?”
“From your mother.”
“Why are you afraid of letters?”
Samuel looked toward the window.
“Because I never read them.”
Silence.
“She wrote to me for years,” he said.
His voice had become almost inaudible.
“I sent every one back unopened.”
Daniel stared at him.
Samuel continued.
“When she d/i/e/d, Robert put them in a deposit box.”
Everything we had assumed shifted again.
Samuel had not been hunting money.
Not really.
He had been chasing a locked box filled with the words of a woman he
