The St. Bridget’s parish hall smelled like damp wool, stale coffee, and the specific, dusty scent of things people are finally ready to let go of. It was nine days after my mother’s funeral. The air felt heavy, like it was waiting for me to do something, but I was just tired.

I was standing by the intake table, sorting through the donations my brother Wayne had dropped off earlier that morning.

Wayne is not a man of details. He is a man of speed and efficiency. He cleared out Mom’s apartment in Toledo in forty-eight hours, shoved her life into heavy-duty trash bags, and hauled them to the church without checking if a single thing was worth keeping. He assumed there was nothing of value. That was always his mistake.

I pulled out a heavy gray wool coat. It was the one Mom wore to every Christmas service for the last fifteen years. The fabric was worn at the cuffs and thin at the elbows. My hands moved on autopilot, reaching for the pricing gun, but my thumb brushed against something irregular in the lining. There was a lump, stiff and rectangular, hidden near the bottom hem.

I squeezed it. It felt like paper. I stopped moving. The room full of women chatting about chipped mugs and old puzzles seemed to drift away. I walked over to a folding chair tucked in the corner, the one where the volunteers usually sat to rest their feet. I didn’t want anyone to see me.

I worked at the stitching with my thumbnail. It took a while. Mom had used tight, double-knotted stitches, the kind she used to reinforce my school clothes when money was so tight we couldn’t afford new ones. When the thread finally gave way, I pulled out a tight roll of cash, bound with a thick, yellowed rubber band.

I sat there for a long time, just holding it. Inside were bundles of twenties and fifties, some so old they were soft as fabric. I counted them twice. Six thousand, three hundred dollars.

But it was the note tucked against the bills that made my hands shake. Her handwriting was shaky, different from the elegant cursive I remembered from my childhood, but the words were sharp. “Patricia, take this and go before he does to you what he did to me.”

He. My father had been dead for eleven years.

I sat there in that echoing hall and felt the floor tilt. My father had been the one who handled the money, which was just a polite way of saying he kept my mother in a cage. She had to ask permission to buy a spool of thread. I remember her counting change in the car before we walked into the Krogers, her lips moving silently as she calculated the tax, terrified of being short at the register in front of people.