For one shameful second, I imagined keeping it.
Just one second. I saw it so clearly. Putting it in my coat pocket. Walking out to the parking lot. Driving to the pawn shop in Sedalia on Monday. A new roof. New shoes. A full refrigerator.
Nobody would ever know.
Then Ellie looked up at me with her serious brown eyes. Her mother’s eyes.
“Do you think somebody’s crying because they lost it?” she asked.
I swallowed hard.
“Let’s find out, sweetheart,” I said.
My name is Nora Whitfield.
I’m seventy years old. I’ve been raising my granddaughter, Ellie, by myself since we lost her parents three years ago.
My daughter, Lisa, and her husband, Tom, died on Interstate 70 on a Saturday night in October. A car accident, the police said. That’s what I tell people. That’s what it says in the obituary. Died in a car accident.
