My son di3d, my daughter-in-law kept the four-million-dollar house and told me, “Go d!e in the mountains, useless old woman”… But the night a floorboard broke beneath my feet, I found what my son had hidden.

My daughter-in-law threw my suitcase at my feet before the funeral flowers had even wilted.

“Go die up here, useless old woman,” Sloane said, shoving me backward through the splintered cabin door. “Nobody wants you anymore.”

The suitcase toppled across warped floorboards. My shoulder struck the wall hard enough to rattle an old iron candlestick from the altar shelf. I clutched my son’s framed photograph to my chest before I fell.

Outside, dusk was closing over the Colorado mountains. The cabin sat alone among dark pines, thirty miles from the nearest town, a place my husband and I had once used for elk season and summer storms. We had not slept there in fifteen years.

Sloane stood in the doorway in a red satin dress she had worn to the memorial dinner, her blonde hair still smooth, her lipstick still perfect.

It enraged me that grief had touched me like a hammer and touched her like mist.

I reached for Neftalí’s photograph with both hands when she slapped my fingers away.

The frame fell, skidding over dust.

I lunged after it. She caught my shoulder and spun me toward the ruined room.

“The house, the money, even his memories belong to me now.”

The mansion in Cherry Creek had been valued at nearly four million dollars. It was the home where I had cooked every Christmas dinner for eleven years, where my son had asked me to move in after my husband died, where I had folded his shirts through chemotherapy and prayed over him while he slept.

Sloane kicked my suitcase deeper into the cabin.

Then she slammed the door and left me there.

Her car roared down the dirt road, taking the last clean line of civilization with it.

For a long time I stood breathing through pain. My cheek burned where she had struck me two nights earlier after I refused to pack. The bruise on my ribs throbbed. The back of my neck felt hot and stiff.

I picked up my son’s photograph.

In it, Neftalí—Nate, to everyone outside our family—was standing in front of the mountain cabin ten years younger, smiling into the wind. He had my husband’s broad shoulders and my father’s eyes. During his final month, those eyes had turned careful, watchful, like a man trying to say something without giving away that he was afraid.

I pressed the frame against my chest and looked around.

The cabin smelled of dust, old pine, and mouse droppings. A cot leaned broken against the far wall. A cracked basin sat upside down on a stool. The altar shelf still held a saint statue, a rusted lantern, and the bent brass vase I had bought at a church sale in 1998.

“Why did you leave me with her, Neftalí?” I whispered.

The words came out more angry than grieving.

I slammed the iron candlestick onto the floor.

The blow rang hollow.

I froze.

Slowly, I knelt. The candlestick had struck a floorboard just left of the altar. My fingers found a seam too clean to be random. I dug my nails beneath it and pulled.

The wood lifted.

A dark compartment opened below.