The moment I lifted it, I knew something was wrong.

It was far too heavy for flour.

I stood there a second with it in my hands, trying to make the weight make sense.

Flour is light; a full tin of it has a soft, shifting heft, and this had none of that.

This was dense and dead-still, the weight of something packed tight and long settled.

For half a heartbeat my mind reached for the small ordinary explanations — maybe she’d used it to store something heavy, maybe it had rusted through.

But my hands already knew.