I am thirty-six years old and I did not know, until the second of December 2024, that there is a room in the county building where you can look up who owns any house in this county for nothing.

The second is that I had been given a mystery, and a mystery is a thing you solve by digging, and digging feels like work in a way that typing a surname into a terminal does not.

And the third is the real one.

My grandmother had written my name in a pencil note in a bank book, and I had decided on the afternoon of the fourteenth of October that I was going to be the person who deserved it.

And you do not deserve something in four minutes for two dollars.