He had counted, in his own written words, on my not checking the accounts until the ink was dry; he had counted on the grieving, distracted, broken-bodied wife being too far gone to read to the bottom of the page.

He had forgotten, if he ever knew, whose granddaughter I was.

Amalia had been dead three years by that morning in the hospital, and yet she reached out of the grave through a habit she’d drilled into a small girl at her kitchen table and stopped me, thumb hovering over the screen, and made me scroll down. Read to the bottom, mija. I did.

And the truth was exactly where she always promised it would be — in the part he hoped I’d skip.