“She’s lost her mind, Dad,” Ryan said — loudly, carefully, setting the record straight for no one. “She’s locked herself in. We have to breach the window to save her.”

He raised the crowbar. The iron caught what little light there was.

And in the stretched-out second before it came down, my mind went back to the plastic tote sitting open on my bedroom floor.

They need what’s inside them before you look at it.

When my mother died four years ago, Arthur handled everything. He told us she’d gone without a will — that her life insurance and savings passed to him, to take care of the family.

He used that for years to demand money from me. Mom’s funds had dried up on her medical bills, he said. I owed it to her memory to carry Ryan through his hard times.