I spent three years wondering if I was the problem. Maybe I wasn’t grateful enough, or maybe I was just the daughter who stayed too close and grew too predictable. That is what Lester told me, anyway.

When Daddy’s will was read in the drafty living room of the old farmhouse, the air felt heavy enough to choke on. The lawyer was a man named Mr. Henderson who smelled like peppermint and failure. He read the numbers out like he was reciting a grocery list.

Lester and my younger brother, Dean, got the house. They got the eighty acres of scrubby pasture. They got the $96,522 in certificates of deposit that Daddy had been hoarding like a dragon. I got his Hohner accordion.

The one he used to wheeze through Silent Night on every single Christmas, whether he had the breath for it or not.

Lester laughed then. It was a wet, grating sound. He looked at me, and his eyes were full of that familiar, sharp pity. Figures, he said. You were always the sentimental one.

I didn’t argue. I just picked up the instrument. It was heavy, far heavier than it had any right to be for a hollow box of reeds and air.

I drove the twenty minutes back to my own little place on the edge of town, the accordion sitting on the passenger seat like a grumpy hitchhiker. I wasn’t even going to keep it. I figured I would drop it at the thrift store on Monday and be done with it.

But when I got home, I set it on the kitchen table to get my coat off. It shifted, and I heard a metallic rattle. Not the sound of loose reeds. It sounded like something hard, something deliberate, hitting wood.

I stood there for a long time. My hands were shaking, but not from grief. I hadn’t cried for Daddy in a week.

I grabbed a butter knife from the drawer. I knew I shouldn’t be prying into it. It felt like a violation. But the rattle was itching at the back of my brain, a low hum of paranoia that had been building for months.

The back clasp was stubborn. I had to force the tip of the knife in, and the wood groaned as the old brass pin gave way.

My breath just stopped. It didn’t hitch; it just ceased to exist in my lungs.

Folded into the bellows, hidden behind the internal structure where no one would ever think to look, was a stack of yellowed papers. They were bundled with a heavy rubber band that snapped the second I touched it.

And a brass key. A heavy, old-fashioned key with a paper tag tied to the loop. The tag had a date written on it: June 14, 1994.