Chapter 16
Tessa
Ihad no idea what day it was.
When you were locked in a decrepit house, time seemed to blend together. Sunlight barely reached the grimy windows, and the air smelled faintly of dust and mildew. I often wondered if I was going insane or if there was black mold and it was eating away at my brain.
I was in one of the spare rooms downstairs—it had probably been an office at some point—and was throwing odds and ends into boxes. Felix and I had just filled that dumpster less than a week ago, but it was already looking like we’d need a new one soon.
The cabinet drawers were a mess. Dusty folders, old bills, and random trinkets spilled out in a jumbled chaos. But over time, I’d learned that Felix’s grandmother had a habit of hiding money and valuables in the most unlikely places. I had found them between papers, under false bottoms, even inside old books.
So I had to be meticulous. Every envelope, every scrap of paper, every odd object got examined, unfolded, and sorted. My fingers brushed against yellowed receipts, tiny slips of paper with dates written in shaky handwriting, and small envelopes tucked in books.
I leaned down and reached my hand far back into the filing cabinet to make sure I didn’t miss anything. My fingers brushed against the cold, rough wood at the very back, and that’s when I noticed them—dates, etched deep into the grain. They weren’t neat, like someone had been keeping a ledger; they were frantic, uneven, like whoever had carved them had been counting time in secret, desperately.
And then it hit me. I was pretty sure these were the same dates I had found scratched under the wallpaper in the kitchen. The same numbers, carved into two different surfaces in this house. My pulse quickened as a cold realization settled over me. Someone had been marking time here, obsessively, and their counting hadn’t stopped with just one hiding place.
Why?
I sat back on my heels, staring at the jagged numbers as if they might rearrange themselves into an answer. Whoever had done this hadn’t just been passing the time—they had beentrackingsomething. Recording it. Maybe even warning someone. A chill prickled down my spine as the thought crept in, unshakable now: the house wasn’t just cluttered with Felix’s grandmother’s secrets. It was holding onto someone else’s, too. And if I wanted to understand what was really going on here, I’d have to start piecing the mystery together.
I grabbed one of the blank envelopes I had found in an empty book. With a pen I’d clipped to my shirt earlier, I crouched down and carefully copied the dates one by one, my handwriting shaky from the adrenaline buzzing in my veins. I didn’t want to trust my memory, not with something this strange.
When I finished, I tore the paper free and held it up, comparing the messy scrawl to the jagged etchings in the wood. Now I’d have to bring it to the kitchen, lay it against the numbers I’d uncovered there, and see if they really matched.
Part of me hoped I’d find a mistake, that my brain was just connecting dots where there weren’t any. But another part—the part that had already started racing ahead—knew I was probably right. And if I was, then someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure these dates were etched into surfaces that weren’t easily found.
Clutching the scrap of paper, I pushed myself to my feet and headed for the kitchen. The air felt heavier in there, like the walls themselves knew what I was about to do. My hand hovered for a moment before I pressed my fingers against the loose seam in the wallpaper, the one I’d already tugged at before.
The brittle paper flaked under my touch as I peeled it back, exposing the raw plaster beneath. There they were—jagged, uneven, gouged deep enough to last decades. My heart thudded hard in my chest as I held up the note, lining my shaky scrawl against the carved dates.
A perfect match.
“What the…” I said aloud, though no one was around to hear me.
I wasn’t here to play detective. I was here to box up junk and clear out the mess Felix’s grandma had left behind, and maybe pay a fraction of the $60,000 debt for my father. But crouched in front of the wall, staring at those uneven scratches, I couldn’t help myself. This wasn’t dust or forgotten heirlooms. This was deliberate.
I looked down at my scrap of paper, the dates scrawled out in my messy handwriting, and then back at the wall. If these numbers meant something, then Felix probably deserved to know. But what could I even say?Hey, I found your grandma’ssecret calendar carved into the plaster?Yeah, that’d go over real well.
Still, I couldn’t leave it alone. My mind was already spinning with questions. Why mark the same dates in two different hiding spots? Why go to such lengths to bury them under wallpaper and at the back of a filing cabinet?
And then I remembered the pocket watch.
I straightened slowly, the thought coming like a spark in the dark. The little dial wouldn’t budge without a code, and I wasn’t able to get it open to see inside. I’d turned it over in my hands until my fingers hurt, then tossed it into my “keep” pile with other expensive things to give to Felix.
What if the code wasn’t random at all, but was one of these dates?
I glanced at the paper again, the ink still fresh where I’d scrawled them down. My pulse quickened. It was probably buried under half a dozen boxes in the front room, and would take me at least an hour to find. A proverbial needle in a haystack.
But suddenly, cleaning didn’t matter.
“Fuck cleaning,” I muttered under my breath, shoving the paper into my back pocket. The idea was stupid; borderline insane. There was only a small chance that one of these dates could unlock that pocket watch. And, in the infinitesimal chance it worked, what was I going to do from there?
But the thought had dug its claws in, and I couldn’t shake it.
I strode toward the front room, already eyeing the leaning towers of boxes I’d stacked, calculating where I might have buried it in the “keep” pile. My fingers itched to start tearing everything apart until I got my hands on that watch.
I dropped to my knees in front of the pile, bracing myself to start hauling boxes out one by one—
