The Teller’s Glass
The next morning, I didn’t go to work. I took the bus downtown to the main branch of the bank listed on the book, my hands shaking so violently I could barely hold my purse.

The entire ride there, I kept telling myself it was a glitch. A computer error from the nineties that never got corrected. It had to be.
I walked up to the teller window, a quiet, professional-looking woman, and slid the book under the glass barrier along with my ID and my mother’s death certificate. “I need a complete historical statement for this account,” I whispered, my voice cracking. “Please.”
The teller gave me a polite nod and typed the account number into her terminal. I watched her face change in real-time. The polite, mundane customer-service smile completely vanished. Her eyes widened, her posture stiffened, and she looked up at me, then back at the screen, and then around the room as if looking for a manager.
Without saying a single word, she hit print. The machine behind her hummed to life, spitting out page after page of transaction history. She gathered the papers, stacked them neatly, and slowly slid them through the slot beneath the glass.

“Is… is it real?” I managed to choke out.
“It is entirely legitimate, ma’am,” the teller said, her voice dropping to a low, intense whisper. “The funds are fully cleared.”
I grabbed the papers and walked over to a marble counter near the corner of the lobby, my knees feeling like jelly. I started reading from the very first line, and as I did, a cold, sickening dread washed over me.
It wasn’t a lottery win. It wasn’t a slow accumulation of savings.
Every single month, on the exact same date, a fixed deposit of $300,000 had been electronically transferred into the account.

It had happened every month, without a single failure, for eighteen years straight.
I flipped rapidly to the very beginning of the statement, tracing the dates backward. The very first deposit of $300,000 had been made on October 14th, 2008.