“He collects them,” I said. “He has for years.”
I set his mug on the table.
“I just want a quiet day,” I whispered.
“We can still have that,” Caleb said. “We don’t have to let them take over.”
“It is just their way of showing they care,” I said, though the words felt heavy in my mouth.
I sat down opposite him and pulled the paper calendar toward me. October fourteenth was circled in blue ink, a small, lonely square among the empty months.
Caleb reached across the table and touched my hand.
“We don’t owe them anything, right?” he asked.
I looked at the blue circle on the paper.
“Of course not,” I said.
The silence in the kitchen felt thicker than usual, pressing against my temples. I stared at the calendar, feeling a strange weight in my chest despite the generous promise.
The low hum of our cheap kitchen refrigerator was the only sound in the apartment at seven in the morning. Caleb’s coffee mug sat cold near the edge of the Formica table, next to a stack of old yellowed envelopes we had yet to sort. The smell of cheap filter coffee hung heavy in the air, a familiar comfort that felt entirely out of place. He stood behind my chair, his hand resting light on my shoulder, his breathing steady and slow.
On the laptop screen, the email from my father looked identical to the formal corporate memos he sent to his clients. The attachment was a three-page PDF document. At the top left of the first page was the crisp, blue-and-gold logo of Ohio Valley Trust, the local bank where my father had kept his business accounts for thirty years.
The document was titled Invoice for Family Reimbursement and Administrative Costs. The bold number at the very bottom of the ledger was seventy-three thousand four hundred eighteen dollars.
