I called Callum from the hallway. “You’ve cleared everything.” He replied that it had to be done eventually. I reminded him Dad had only been gone three weeks. “Well, you weren’t going to do it, were you?” he answered. I asked about the van, and he casually said it had been scrapped. It was a 2019 Transit with just 41,000 miles. He had actually sold it on the twelfth for $9,400. I discovered that because the buyer contacted the number on an old advertisement that still forwarded to my phone. Then I asked about the small floor safe beneath the stairs. Dad had installed it around 1994. Callum paused before saying, “There was nothing in it.”

I want to acknowledge that Callum did look after Dad. For the final two years, he was the one who visited every Sunday. I came every six weeks and called every night, but those things weren’t the same. He had reminded me of that repeatedly, and he wasn’t wrong. However, something else had been happening. In March 2021, Callum became a signatory on Dad’s bank account because Dad could no longer visit the branch himself. After that, money began disappearing. I knew nothing about it until a Thursday morning in the solicitor’s office, when Priscilla Vanterpool, who had handled our family’s legal affairs for decades, finished reading the will and revealed that Dad had left something else.