Chapter 1

A little girl called me Grandma last night.

My mother has been dead since November 2019. Pancreatic cancer. Eleven weeks from diagnosis to the funeral. I was twenty-six. I’m thirty-three now, and until yesterday the worst thing in that storage unit was a box of her Christmas decorations with a broken angel on top.

I need to go back a bit or this won’t make sense.

When Mom died, my sister Maya handled everything. She is the organized one. Always has been. She called the hospice, the funeral home, the bank, the landlord. I showed up and boxed things and tried not to look at the hospital bed in the living room. We kept the stuff we couldn’t throw away and rented a unit at StorageKing off Route 9. We told ourselves we’d go through it “when we were ready.”

We were never ready. The unit just sat there. Auto-pay from a joint account we forgot to close. Last month StorageKing sent a letter. They’re converting the place into climate-controlled units and everything has to be out by the 22nd or they auction it.

Maya was in Denver for work. She asked me to handle it. I almost paid them another year just so I wouldn’t have to go.

I went on Tuesday after work with two coffees and a roll of contractor bags. The unit smelled like wet cardboard and that fake vanilla air freshener Mom used to clip to the vent in her car. I started with the easy stuff. Clothes. Kitchen boxes. A lamp I remembered from the hallway.

The lockbox was under the Christmas decorations.

Green metal. About the size of a toaster. Rust on the latch. I don’t remember ever seeing it in the house. There was no key. I sat on an overturned crate and used a supermarket loyalty card like a shim, the way we used to break into our own house when Mom locked herself out.

Inside: a stack of paper, rubber-banded by year. And a flip phone. One of those Nokia bricks with the little color screen. It was dead.

The papers were phone bills.

I thought they were old. Mom’s landline, or the cell she had when we were in high school. Then I saw the dates.

December 2019.

March 2020.

All of 2021. 2022. 2023. 2024. 2025.

July 2026.

Every month. Same account. Same number. Billed to Helen Voss, P.O. Box 4418. I have never heard of that PO box. The address under it is a UPS Store in a strip mall I drive past on the way to work.

The bills were itemized. Almost every call was the same.

One number. Every Sunday. 7:02 p.m. Between eleven and fourteen minutes. Then nothing until the next Sunday.

There were a few other numbers scattered through the years. I didn’t recognize any of them. The Sunday number showed up 341 times.

I sat there long enough for my coffee to go cold.

I told myself it was identity theft. Someone used her information after she died. It happens. The account stayed open because nobody cancelled it. Maya handled the death admin, and Maya is thorough, but even Maya could miss a prepaid cell on a PO box we didn’t know existed.

That was the version I liked.

I bought a charger for the Nokia at a pharmacy on the way home. The kind of charger they keep on a pegboard behind the counter. It took twenty minutes to find one that fit. I plugged the phone in on my kitchen counter and went to take a shower because I didn’t want to watch it light up.

When I came back it had 4% battery and no passcode.

The call log matched the bills. Sunday, 7:02, every week. The contact was saved as “S.”

There were no texts except one, from a number with no name, dated the day of Mom’s funeral:

It’s done. She went quiet. You’re clear until he turns 33.

I am 33. I turned 33 in March.

I did what anyone would do. I called Maya. It went to voicemail. I didn’t leave a message because I didn’t know what the message would be.

Then I called the Sunday number from my own phone.

It rang twice.

A kid picked up. A girl. Maybe seven, maybe eight. Bright voice, like she’d been waiting next to the phone.

“Grandma?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Grandma, you sound weird. Mom said you might sound different this time. Are you coming on Friday? I made the picture.”

A woman took the phone. I heard the kid protest in the background, then a door close.

“Is this Nathan?”

That’s my name. She said it like she’d been holding it in her mouth for years.

“Who is this?”

“She said you’d call the week the unit closed.” The woman was trying to keep her voice flat and not quite managing it. “Listen to me. There is a green notebook in the lockbox, under the lining. The lining lifts on the left side. Read the last page before you talk to Maya. Do you understand? Before you talk to Maya.”

“My mother is dead.”

“I know what they buried.” A pause. Someone talking in another room. “Nathan. The funeral wasn’t hers. Read the last page. And do not come here. I mean that. If you try to find this number I will change it and you will be alone with this.”

“Who is the girl?”

She hung up.

I sat on my kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and called the number back. Disconnected. I tried twice more. Same thing.

The lockbox was still in my car. I brought it inside and dumped it on the table and tore at the bottom with a butter knife. The left side of the lining was glued down except for one corner. Under it, flat as a secret, was a green spiral notebook. The kind you buy in a 5-pack for school.

Mom’s handwriting. I’d know it anywhere. She made her r’s like little n’s. She used to write my lunch notes in that handwriting.

The notebook is not a diary. It’s more like a log. Dates. Short lines. Some pages are just names I don’t recognize with check marks next to them. I didn’t read it properly. I did what the woman said. I flipped to the last page.

One line, in pencil, pressed hard enough to groove the paper underneath.

August 28 — this is when they notice you know.

Today is the 25th.

I was still staring at it when the Nokia buzzed on the counter.

One new text. No name. Just a photo.

It’s my kitchen window, taken from the yard. You can see the magnet of the bad Mexican restaurant on the fridge. You can see the lockbox on the table.

You can see me, standing there, holding the green notebook.

The timestamp on the photo is 9 minutes ago.

I am writing this from the bathroom with the door locked and the lights off. I looked through the blinds. There is nobody in the yard. The motion light didn’t come on. My fence is six feet tall.

Maya just texted me.

Heard you called. Everything okay? I’m coming over tonight. Don’t go anywhere.

She is in Denver.

She is supposed to be in Denver.

I haven’t answered her.

I haven’t gone back to the last pages of the notebook yet. I skimmed one more thing before I locked myself in here. About a third of the way through, on a page dated two days after the funeral, Mom wrote a sentence and underlined it twice.

If Nathan finds this before he is 33, I failed. If he finds it after, tell him I am sorry about the other boy. He was already gone.

I don’t have a brother.

I keep thinking about the little girl calling me Grandma.

I keep thinking about “the other boy.”

I keep thinking about the photo of my own window, and the fact that whoever took it is close enough to know I opened the notebook, and Maya is suddenly on a plane, and Friday is three days away, and I do not know what happens on Friday.

I’m going to read the rest of the notebook. If I don’t post again, it isn’t because I didn’t want to.