She shoved it into my hand.
Cold metal.
A key.
“Put that in your pocket.”
“Vanessa—”
“Please.”
The basement door began to open.
My brother called down, “Jess?”
Vanessa shut the freezer.
Then she whispered, “Whatever he says, don’t give him that key.”
Our mother, Diane, had died four days earlier.
It wasn’t sudden.
She’d had congestive heart failure for years, and the last six months had been especially hard.
Still, knowing someone is dying doesn’t make the phone call easier.
Ryan and I spent the next few days doing what families do after death.
Funeral home. Flowers. Insurance paperwork. Calling relatives.
Going through drawers because apparently death creates an urgent need to find birth certificates nobody has seen since 1987.
Vanessa helped too.
She’d been married to Ryan for 14 years.
We’d never been especially close, but I liked her.
Quiet. Competent.
The person who remembered everyone’s birthdays.
She and Ryan had two children, Ava, 12, and Mason, nine.
The strange thing started the morning after Mom died.
Vanessa pulled me aside in the kitchen.
“What are you doing with the basement freezer?”
I stared at her. “The freezer?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.”
It was an ancient chest freezer. Cream-colored. Scratched.
Probably 20 years old.
