Grandma folded the letter carefully and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she got up, walked to the shelf, and placed it inside the same metal box where Grandpa’s documents had once been kept, alongside the yellow envelope and everything else that mattered enough to preserve.
I asked why she’d kept it there, in that particular box.
She smiled faintly. “Because change should be remembered too.”
A few weeks after that, Aunt Monica sent her own letter, considerably shorter than my father’s. She apologized plainly, without much elaboration. She admitted she had convinced herself, somewhere along the way, that Grandma would simply never notice the money disappearing. She admitted that jealousy, watching my father’s business succeed while her own ventures repeatedly failed, and a kind of entitlement she’d apparently absorbed without ever fully examining it, had turned her into someone she barely recognized when she finally looked at herself clearly.
