Less than a minute later, a branch manager in a navy blazer came out holding a sealed cream envelope.
My full name was written across the front in handwriting I would have recognized even if I had lived to be a hundred.
Richard’s.
My legs went weak before the woman said a word.
She asked me, in a voice so gentle it frightened me, if I would come with her to her office.
I followed because I no longer trusted myself to stand in public.
She shut the door, turned her monitor slightly in my direction, and tapped the screen with one manicured nail.
The number there did not belong to my life.
$314,287.64.
I looked at it once.
Then again.
I waited for the digits to rearrange themselves into something smaller, something logical, something that matched the man who had placed a bank card in my palm five years earlier and spoken to me as if I were a burden he was finally free to set down.
