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Dez’s middle drawer sticks.

It’s been sticking all week. Every time I open it, it catches two-thirds of the way out and I have to lift and jiggle it. This time I’m frustrated enough to yank it, and it comes all the way off its runners and lands in my lap, pens and paper clips everywhere.

“Smooth,” Merek says.

“Shut up.” I turn the drawer over to see what’s catching.

There’s an envelope taped to the bottom.

Two strips of old yellow tape, one at each end. A plain white envelope, letter size. On the front, in Dez’s tight, slanted handwriting, the same handwriting that’s on fifteen years of birthday cards in my glove box, it says:

Tara.

The room goes quiet.

I peel the tape off carefully, the way you’d peel a label off a bottle you wanted to keep. My hands aren’t steady. The envelope isn’t sealed. There’s one sheet of paper inside, folded in thirds.

Tara,

If you’re reading this, you came, and you’re sitting at my desk, and this drawer stuck on you the way it’s stuck on me for thirty years. Good. It means you’re still here.

I don’t have time to explain all of it, and I’m not sure I’d get it right if I did.

Don’t trust anyone in a hurry for you to leave. And whatever they do, don’t miss a night.

I’m sorry I wasn’t a better uncle. You’d have been a hell of a bartender here.

D.

I read it twice. Then I fold it back up along the same creases, and put it in the envelope, and hold it in both hands in my lap.

“He knew,” Merek says quietly.

I don’t answer right away. I’m looking at the D. at the bottom. It’s the same D. that’s on every birthday card, under Happy birthday, kiddo, next to a folded twenty. I always thought he signed it that way because he didn’t know me well enough to write Uncle Dez.

“He’s been dead three weeks,” I say. “He didn’t know about the freezer. Or the vault.” I put the letter back in its envelope. “But he knew somebody might want me gone. And he knew enough to tell me not to miss a night.”

“If you miss one,” Lenart says, “your share passes to whoever’s named in the codicil.”

“So if I leave, somebody else gets my share.” I hold the envelope in both hands. “And I don’t know who.”

Under the drawer, beside the two strips of torn tape where the envelope was, there’s a second rectangle on the wood. Clean, where the dust didn’t settle. Smaller than the envelope. Two curls of yellow tape, torn at the ends.

I look at it, and then I put the drawer back on its runners, and I don’t say anything yet.

Harold Pike answers on the second ring.

“Ms. Iverson. How are you settling in?”

“Somebody keeps trying to hurt me,” I say. “Mr. Pike, I need to ask you about the codicil.”

There’s a pause. “I’ll tell you what I can.”

“Who’s named in it?”

“I don’t know.” He says it plainly, like a man who’s been asked before. “Desmond executed the codicil in my office and sealed the beneficiary’s name in a separate envelope, with his own seal across the flap. It’s in my firm’s safe. My instructions are to open it only if the condition is met, and to release it to no one before then. Not to you, not to the other owners, and not to me.”

“And the condition is me missing a night.”