Chapter 9: The Safe

Serafina's POV

Tadeo left through the orchard door in his socks, with a gun in his belt and his shirt buttoned wrong.

He didn't tell me to stay.

He didn't tell me anything.

He only touched two fingers to my cheek on his way out, and then he was gone.

I stood in his study in my robe and listened to the house go quiet.

Then I went to the painting on the east wall.

It was a field of wheat in October, in a plain gold frame.

I swung it out on its hinge.

Behind it was a small square safe, with a keyhole the size of a dime.

The brass key went in.

Inside there were three things.

A thick brown ledger with a rubber band around it.

A small black recorder, the old kind, with a tape inside.

And a photograph in a cracked plastic sleeve.

I lifted the photograph out, and my knees gave.

It was my mother.

She stood on the steps of the church in a yellow dress, laughing, with one hand shading her eyes.

She was thirty-four.

I'd been ten when she died, and I had never seen that photograph, and I had never seen her look so happy.

On the back, in a boy's handwriting, someone had written a date.

It was the Saturday before she was shot.

"You found it," Tadeo said behind me.

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