We pried up the boards ourselves after they left, because neither of us could sleep and because my grandmother said she wanted to know what her son had been so certain was down there. It was a fireproof box. Inside were my grandfather’s naturalization papers, four war letters, and a savings bond ledger from 1974 worth almost nothing now.

There was also a sealed envelope addressed to my father in my grandfather’s handwriting, dated eleven days before he died. Grandma read it first, alone, in the kitchen. Then she let me read it. It was a letter forgiving him for something that had happened in 1998, a debt and a lie I had never known about, and it ended by asking him to look after his mother. He never opened it. It had been under his feet the entire time he was tearing up her floor.

The forensic accountant found sixty-nine thousand dollars gone. My grandmother declined to press charges, which I fought her on for a month. She said prison would not return the money and would return nothing else either.