I’m going to try to summarize the rest of it without going on too long, because it was a full page and parts of it were personal and I’m still not sure how much of it is mine to share.

The short version is this. There was a bell. There had been a bell, a long time ago, one that the original congregation had planned to install in the small tower above the entrance, the one that’s been decorative and empty my entire time there. The bell was paid for, ordered, everything arranged. And then something happened, something this person was involved in, and the bell never arrived. The letter wasn’t entirely clear on the details, and I think that might have been intentional. What it said, clearly, was that this had been on their conscience for a very long time. That two hundred dollars a month was the closest they could get to making it right without making it public. That they were writing now because their health had changed and they wanted someone to know the full amount before they were gone.

The letter was signed with a first name only. I recognized the name. I sat there for probably ten minutes without moving, just holding the page.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this information since Monday and I genuinely don’t know. Part of me thinks I should talk to our current pastor, Pastor Diane, and just hand her the whole thing, the letter, my notebook, all of it. Let the church decide. That’s probably the right answer. But there’s another part of me that feels protective of this person in a way I can’t fully explain, and the fact that they signed only a first name feels deliberate to me.

Like they wanted someone to know without making it a whole thing.

I haven’t deposited the money yet. I know I need to. I know it belongs to the church and not to me and not to the person who left it. But I keep coming back to the reason it was given, which is a bell. There’s still an empty tower above the entrance. I looked up what a church bell costs this week and I won’t pretend the number didn’t surprise me. But sixty-four thousand eight hundred dollars is not nothing.

Ray asked me last night why I was so quiet at dinner and I told him I was just tired. I’m not ready to say it out loud to anyone yet, I think. I’ve been carrying the quiet version of this story for twenty-four years without really knowing I was carrying it, and now I have the full version and I’m not sure it’s lighter.