Part 1

I’m Chelsea. A few weeks ago, my father, after a long battle with illness, passed away. The house felt too quiet without him, and every room seemed to hold the shape of his absence.

“I wish I could have shown him his grandchildren.”

The words slipped out with a sigh before I could stop them. I got married when I was twenty-five, exactly five years ago, and on my wedding day my father and I made a promise that meant everything to me.

“I’ll tell you first when I get pregnant.”

But that promise was never fulfilled. That is probably the only real regret I carry about my father. Ever since his illness was discovered a year ago, I did everything I could for him. I went back to my parents’ house as often as possible, visited the hospital with my mother, increased the number of phone calls and video chats, and tried to think of every small thing that might make things easier for him.

Still, grief has a cruel way of turning love into doubt.

“Could I have done more?”

I said it under my breath, but my mother, sitting beside me in the living room, heard me anyway. She turned to me gently, her own face tired from months of caregiving and loss.

“You did well, Chelsea. Really.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. Your father would have been satisfied.”

Just then, the front door opened, and my sister Portia came in. She was not alone. A man in his mid-forties followed her into the living room carrying a leather briefcase, and I assumed at once that he was the lawyer. He stepped forward, handed me a business card, and introduced himself.

“I’m Samuel Samwell, the attorney. Thank you for coming.”

“Please, have a seat,” my mother said, quickly guiding him to a chair.

The moment he sat down, Portia spoke first, as if she had been holding the words in all the way home.

“I heard from this lawyer that Dad left quite an inheritance.”

“It isn’t all for you, Portia. I know that,” I said.

She shot me a sharp look, and I looked right back at her. My sister and I did not get along. We used to be all right, at least in the ordinary way sisters sometimes are, but things had turned sour after we learned about Dad’s illness. One reason was Portia’s arrogant attitude. No matter how many times I reached out to her, she never came to visit him.

Maybe I had been harsh. I was worried sick about our father, and sometimes worry comes out wrong.

“You’re not a child,” I had told her once. “You don’t have to be this stubborn.”

She snapped back immediately.

“I’m not being stubborn. I live in the city. It’s not easy to come all the way to the countryside.”

“But you can get here in two hours by car.”

“Those two hours are hard. It costs money.”

“So money is what matters to you?”

“Of course it is. I’m busy, so stop contacting me.”

That was how conversations with Portia always ended. Even if she lived farther away, she still could have visited once in a while. I believed that with all my heart, and that belief was exactly why our relationship fell apart so quickly. In the end, she never came to see our father, and the bitterness between us remained.

Perhaps sensing the tension in the room, the lawyer raised a hand in a calming gesture.

“Let’s all settle down, please.”

“Okay. I’m sorry,” I said.

He nodded, then opened his briefcase. “As I mentioned on the phone, I have your husband’s will,” he said to my mother.

“When did this happen?” my mother murmured.

“A few weeks before he passed away, he contacted me. I went to the hospital, and he wrote the will in front of me with his primary physician present. They had arranged in advance for the physician to contact me when your husband passed away. After that happened, the doctor called me, and I in turn contacted your family. That’s why I’m here now.”

As he spoke, he pulled out a white envelope and placed it on the table in front of us. My breath caught the second I saw it.

“That’s definitely Dad’s handwriting,” I said quietly.

Portia, already impatient, folded her arms.

“Never mind that. Just tell us what’s in it. I’m busy.”

The lawyer gave a faint, wry smile and opened the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of paper. He read from it carefully. Besides the house and land, my father’s inheritance included some savings and a storage shed.

The house and land were no surprise. But a storage shed?

As I was trying to make sense of that, Portia leaned forward sharply.

“Wait a minute. You didn’t mention the farm.”

“The farm?” the lawyer asked.

“Yes. The farm Dad used to work on as a hobby.”

My father had run a company in the next town over, but after he turned fifty he started feeling his age. I still remembered hearing him talk about it when I was in high school.

“I’m thinking of closing the company. I want to take it easy. Is that all right?”

Portia had been in college then, and she strongly opposed the idea. My mother and I, though, were worried about his health and thought he deserved some peace.

“Don’t worry about the money, Portia. We have enough savings,” Dad had told her.

She agreed only reluctantly. After that, he really did close the company and started farming near our home. He seemed happier doing it than I had seen him in years.

“It feels good to move my body while farming,” he used to say with a smile.

Seeing him like that made me glad I had supported the decision. Portia never seemed to feel the same. She had once said she would return home after college, but instead she got a job near her university and eventually married the CEO of an IT company she met through work.

Anyway, that was why my father had been farming until he got sick. Portia still insisted the farm should be treated as part of the inheritance. The lawyer reviewed the documents, found an attached note, and answered almost immediately.

“The farm is rented land.”

“Rented?” Portia said, visibly disappointed. “I thought we owned that large piece of land.”

The field where my father grew vegetables had been spacious, that was true. But honestly, it might have been too much for any of us who knew nothing about farming. Quietly, I found myself thinking that maybe it was better this way.

The conversation then shifted to dividing the inheritance. The lawyer cleared his throat and read the next part.

“As for the division of the estate, the house and land go to the wife.”

Portia nodded at once. “So we can divide the rest however we want.”

“Please divide the savings and the storage shed fairly between the two daughters,” the lawyer said.

Portia leaned in. “Savings means cash, right? I’ll take the cash. How much is it?”

“The savings amount to about one hundred thousand dollars,” the lawyer said. “At that amount, there is no inheritance tax.”

“Then I’ll take the hundred thousand in cash.”

She said it with such open triumph that my whole body went tense. I couldn’t accept something that selfish without speaking up.

“Wait a minute. I object.”

“Why?” she shot back.

“I’m the oldest daughter,” she added a second later, as if that settled everything.

“That’s irrelevant,” I said. “You can’t just decide that.”

“You can have the storage shed.”

“What? What even is that?”

Ignoring me, she turned to the lawyer again. He flipped through the paperwork and explained.

“It is the storage shed next to the field. You would inherit the building, the land attached to it, and everything inside.”

“With land?” Portia’s eyes lit up for a moment.

“The plot that comes with it is very small,” the lawyer said, tempering her excitement. “About sixty-five square feet. Roughly the size of a small bedroom.”

“A small bedroom?” she repeated.

He placed several photographs on the table. They showed the outside and the inside of the shed. The exterior looked like a shabby, half-forgotten shack. Inside were only basic tools: a hose, scissors, shovels, and other ordinary items that did not appear valuable at all.

“I don’t want it,” Portia said with a grimace.

I stared at the photographs too. Everything about the place looked plain. Maybe those things held sentimental value, but they certainly did not look like anything that would bring in money.

“Fine,” Portia said at last. “I’ll take the cash. You can have that dirty shed.”

“Hold on. That isn’t fair,” I said.

“What are you complaining about now? You were the one who said family mattered more than money.”

That answer made it hard to argue in the moment, but I still hated the arrangement. If I didn’t keep speaking up, she would take all of Dad’s inheritance without a second thought.

“So we’re good, then?” she pressed.

As I struggled to answer, my mother finally spoke.

“As long as Portia won’t complain later, I have no objections.”

“There’s no way I would,” Portia said immediately.

“Then Portia gets the cash, and Chelsea gets the shed,” my mother said.

“Okay, it’s settled then.”

Portia grinned, but the knot in my chest only tightened.

“Well, I’m not satisfied,” I said.

“Oh, give it up,” she said with a laugh. “You’re so greedy.”

“That’s not it.”

“You care more about Dad than money, right?”

That question left me speechless. Of course family mattered more than money. Money mattered too, but it was never something I thought should be placed above family. While I was still trying to sort out my thoughts, Portia pushed the conversation to its end.

In the final arrangement, my mother received the house and land, my sister took Dad’s savings, and all that was left for me was the dirty old shed. Afterward, Portia even signed a document promising she would not complain about the inheritance division later.

She laughed loudly when she signed it. I, meanwhile, was full of frustration. When the lawyer left, I turned to my mother.

“Mom, why didn’t you help me?”

“I did help you.”

“How?”

“You decided things with Portia. I made sure you got the shed.”

“Huh? I’m not happy about getting that shed.”

My mother smiled in a way I did not understand then.

“You might find something surprisingly good if you look closely.”

That was all she said. I could only puff out my cheeks in response, still irritated and unconvinced.

Part 2

The next day, I got the key from the lawyer and headed for the shed near the field. It was about a ten-minute walk from home along a quiet rural road where almost no one passed by. When I finally reached the field my father had rented for the last year, it looked abandoned. Since he had been hospitalized for so long, nothing was growing there now.

I unlocked the shed and pulled the door open.

“Wow. It’s dusty.”

The air inside smelled dry and stale. Dust lay over everything, probably because nobody had cleaned the place in months. Even so, I thought there might be something sentimental from Dad hidden inside, something small that would make the whole inheritance issue hurt a little less.

I looked around carefully. There was nothing special. It really did seem to be just a dirty shed. All I found were the tools he had used for farming. Those could be considered sentimental, I supposed, but they were not anything unusual.

“Maybe I should just take what’s inside for now,” I murmured.

I was about to leave when a strange thought stopped me. The inside felt smaller than the outside had looked. Maybe it was only because the light in there was dim, but the space felt cramped in a way I couldn’t explain. I stepped back outside and stared at the structure again.

Something was off.

After thinking about it for a moment, I walked around to the back. The rear side of the shed was partly hidden by a thicket of trees and brush, which was probably why no one ever noticed anything unusual. Then I saw it.

A second door.

“Wait. Another entrance?”

I gasped out loud. When I had been inside the shed, there had only been a wall where this door should have shown through. That meant there had to be another section, a narrow hidden space that could only be entered from the back.

The moment I realized it, excitement rushed through me. Dad had always loved surprises. He used to surprise me on birthdays with tiny treasures hidden in places I would never think to look, and as the memory came back to me, my eyes stung with tears.

“This has to be Dad’s surprise,” I whispered.

I hurried back into the shed and started searching for the key to the back door. If he had hidden something there, he would have hidden the key somewhere nearby too. Trusting that feeling, I rummaged through every corner of the shed. After a while, I found two small keys tucked into the handle of a shovel.

My heart started pounding. I went around to the back and tried one of them in the door. With a soft click, it opened.

“What could be in here?”

The hidden space was cramped, only about three feet wide. There was almost nothing inside except a large safe standing alone against the wall. The second I saw it, I recognized it.

“This is from Dad’s company.”

It was the same safe that had once stood in the corner of his office when I was a child. I remembered seeing it there so many times that the sight of it now made my throat tighten. Without thinking, I wrapped my arms around it.

It felt like touching a piece of my father that had somehow been left behind.

This alone would already have made the shed feel worth inheriting. But knowing my father, I didn’t believe for a second that this was the end of the surprise.

“There has to be more,” I said.

I took the second key and slid it into the safe. The metal gave a slightly rusty groan as it turned, and then the door swung open.

The second I saw what was inside, I froze.

“What? No way.”

I was staring at an inheritance I never could have expected. My mind went blank for a moment, then started racing all at once.

“I have to tell Mom.”

I shut the safe again, locked everything carefully, and rushed back to my mother. After I explained what I had found, I called my husband, and with his help we moved the safe away from the field near my parents’ place. Only after the first shock wore off did another thought hit me.

The contents of that safe undoubtedly belonged to Dad. If they counted as part of the inheritance that came with the shed, there was a chance I would owe inheritance tax.

“I’d better get this checked thoroughly,” I said.

Whatever was in there was clearly valuable. I decided to consult the lawyer, and he listened to everything before giving me practical advice.

“For something like that,” he said, “it would be better to consult a certified public accountant.”

A friend referred me to an accountant, and I handed over all the complicated paperwork. I wanted to do everything properly, exactly the way my father would have wanted.

Time passed that way, and nearly a year went by.

Part 3

Just when I thought life had finally settled down, Portia appeared near my house one day. Seeing her there was so unusual that I stopped in the driveway and stared.

“What brings you here all of a sudden?” I asked.

“Well, I had some business at our parents’ house, so I stopped by,” she said.

“Yeah? Something like that?”

Her behavior was odd from the start. No matter how you looked at it, something felt wrong. Even if my house was closer to our parents’ place than hers was, it was still a twenty-minute drive. We were not the kind of sisters who dropped in casually, especially after everything that had happened over Dad’s inheritance. Ours was not the kind of relationship you handled carelessly.

Trying not to show how suspicious I felt, I studied her face. She seemed restless, almost nervous.

“Can I come in?” she asked.

“Sure, but what’s the matter?”

“I have something to talk about.”

She forced a smile, and reluctantly I let her into the house. After I poured coffee for both of us, she kept fidgeting with her cup before finally blurting out the question that had clearly brought her there.

“So… did you win the lottery or something?”

“What?”

“Or did your husband get some huge bonus?”

I tilted my head, completely confused. I never bought lottery tickets because I had no interest in them, and while my husband, who worked a regular salaried job, did get a holiday bonus, it was not even that time of year.

“What on earth are you talking about?” I asked.

Suddenly Portia’s face hardened.

“What, are you making fun of me?”

“No. I seriously don’t know what you mean.”

“Money,” she snapped. “You have it, don’t you?”

That only made me more confused, but she was already charging ahead. A few days earlier, while living her city life, she had apparently run into one of our aunts by chance. According to Portia, our aunt had started the conversation like this:

“I know how hard it’s been since you lost your father. Are you doing okay?”

“Yes, well, I visited him many times when he was sick,” Portia had replied.

Then our aunt said something that caught her attention immediately.

“You must have been relieved, then, getting such a big thank-you gift.”

“Thank-you gift?” Portia had asked.

“Yes. Your sister sent me a five-hundred-dollar gift card as thanks for visiting him.”

That was all Portia needed to hear. The moment she learned I had sent a gift card, she became convinced I had come into money.

“You got a windfall, didn’t you?” she said now, leaning toward me. “Just admit it.”

That was when I finally understood.

“Ah. So that’s what this is about.”

I let out a long sigh, and Portia instantly bristled.

“What’s with that attitude? Are you mocking me?”

“No,” I said. “It was a thank-you gift.”

“So where did you get the money for it?”

“From the inheritance. Remember?”

“Inheritance?”

“Yes. I received an inheritance, so I sent thank-you gifts to relatives who helped us.”

Portia frowned. “All you got was that dirty shed.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But there was a safe inside it. That was where the real inheritance was.”

“A safe? Real inheritance?”

I explained it carefully. Inside the safe had been watches, all of them valuable, collected by my father as a hobby over the years. At first I had no idea what they were worth. But the more I thought about it, the more the numbers started to make sense. Dad had been a business owner who had retired early, and yet the cash savings left behind had only been around one hundred thousand dollars. That always felt strangely low for a man who had once run a successful company.

Eventually, I realized he might have put a great deal of his money into those watches.

“If they’re valuable, you’ll have to pay inheritance tax,” my mother had warned me after seeing the contents of the safe.

“What should I do, Mom?” I had asked.

She had thought for a moment, then answered in the practical tone she always used when emotion alone would not solve anything.

“Things like this always come out. You should declare it properly.”

“So what do I do?”

“Let’s ask that lawyer we spoke to.”

So I consulted the lawyer again. He told me that if you inherit valuables, the inheritance tax is determined by their value at that time. He also told me a certified public accountant could handle the details, so I left it in the accountant’s hands.

The result stunned even me. The watches alone were worth at least five hundred thousand dollars.

“With watches this valuable, you’ll definitely owe inheritance tax,” the accountant said.

“How am I supposed to pay it?” I asked.

“How about keeping the ones you’re emotionally attached to and selling the rest?”

That advice made sense. There was no reason for someone like me, who did not truly understand the market, to hold on to a whole collection of expensive watches. I would rather they go to people who understood their worth. So I sold some of them. I used the money from the sale to pay the inheritance tax, and then I sent thank-you gifts to the relatives who had helped us while Dad was ill.

“The gift cards you heard about came from that,” I told Portia.

Then I opened a small case and showed her the one item I had kept closest to me.

“By the way, this is one of the things I didn’t sell. Dad wore this pocket watch often.”

I held it out where she could see it clearly. “It isn’t especially expensive, but it holds the most memories for me.”

Instead of softening, Portia only frowned more deeply.

“What? You don’t have any left?”

“No, there are still some in the safe.”

“Where is the safe?”

“At Mom’s place. It’s too big for this house. It’s the one Dad used at his company.”

Portia looked away, her expression turning distant and thoughtful in a way that made me uneasy. I could feel something moving behind her eyes, some calculation I couldn’t yet name.

Then, just as suddenly, she stood up.

“I’m leaving now that I know where the money came from.”

And with that, she walked out.

Considering how fixated Portia had always been on money, I had half expected her to start demanding part of the proceeds from the watches right then and there. When she left without causing a scene, I felt relieved.

In that relief, I forgot the uneasy feeling I had noticed a moment earlier.

Portia was not that understanding.

I had simply forgotten it.

Part 4

I was reminded late that night when my phone rang. It was my mother, and the panic in her voice made my blood run cold before she even finished the first sentence.

“Chelsea, it’s urgent. Come over right away.”

“What happened, Mom?”

“It’s just… really bad.”

She was so frantic and unclear that my husband and I rushed out the door without waiting for more explanation. As we neared my mother’s house, I noticed something strange even before we turned onto the road.

The area was flashing red.

“What’s going on?” I whispered.

The answer became clear as we got closer. Several police cars were parked outside my parents’ house. I pushed through the small crowd gathering nearby and ran straight to my mother.

“What happened, Mom?”

According to her, it had been sometime after nine o’clock. Tired, she had already gone to bed when she heard strange noises in the house, sounds like someone searching through things behind a closed door. She instantly thought the worst.

“There’s a burglar,” she had told herself.

She was alone in the house and felt helpless, so she escaped through the window instead of confronting whoever was inside. When she looked back, she could see the beam of a flashlight moving through the rooms.

That was enough for her. She ran to the neighbor’s house and cried out for help.

“There’s a burglar!”

The neighbor came outside at once. They saw the swinging light inside the house too, and naturally the neighbor called the police. Everything that followed happened fast.

Only it was not a burglar at all.

It was Portia.

After hearing the story about the safe, she had slipped into the house to rummage through it. Of course, neither my mother nor the neighbor had any way of knowing that. By the time the police arrived, Portia realized she was in serious trouble. Panicked, she tried to run.

It made no sense. It was her own family home, and there had been no reason to flee like a criminal, but panic does not make people logical. In her rush, she slammed into the open door of the safe. The safe, already unstable where it stood, tipped over and crashed down onto her as she tried to escape.

“So Portia got trapped under it?” I asked, stunned.

“Yes,” my mother said. “That’s what happened.”

“Is she okay?”

“She was taken to the hospital by ambulance. She keeps saying her leg hurts.”

I could barely process what I was hearing.

“What on earth was she thinking?”

Afterward, my mother and I apologized repeatedly to the officers who had come to help, embarrassed that they had been called out so late into a family disaster no one had expected. Then I called Portia’s husband to tell him what had happened.

“You’re saying Portia broke into her own family home and got injured?” he said in disbelief.

“Yes. That’s correct.”

“What is Portia doing?”

Then his voice changed in a way that told me there was more behind the story.

“That’s it. I’m filing for divorce.”

“Divorce?”

Apparently, Portia had already run up a considerable amount of debt. She had been spending heavily on brand-name items, and her husband had only recently discovered just how bad it was. They had a huge fight. In the end, Portia stormed out of the house saying she would borrow money from Mom and pay it back later.

The truth was worse than I expected. She had already used the one hundred thousand dollars she inherited to pay off part of her debt. Even that had not been enough. Still short, she had come to me hoping to squeeze out more money, and once she learned about the safe, greed had pushed her into this disaster.

No wonder her husband was furious.

In the end, Portia was hospitalized with a fractured leg. Her husband came to the hospital and started talking seriously about divorce. Naturally, Portia made a scene.

“I’m not getting divorced. Absolutely not.”

But it was too late. He had already brought the divorce papers with him. Faced with them, she had no real choice but to sign. Now she was lying in a hospital bed in a daze, and next to her was a magazine full of part-time job listings. From the sound of it, she was planning to start working part-time to help pay off what she owed.

Honestly, that was a relief to me.

As for me, after all the commotion, I decided to move back into my parents’ home. Of course I was worried about my mother, and I did not want her living there alone after everything that had happened. But there was another reason too.

I found out I was pregnant.

My husband and I talked it over carefully and decided that moving back home made sense. My mother could help us when the baby came, and one day maybe with future children too. Part of me still aches when I think about my father.

I wish I could have told him about the pregnancy while he was still alive.

But I’m sure he would have been happy for us. When I picture his face, I can almost see his smile. And with that thought in my heart, I find myself looking ahead instead of back, hoping and praying for the safe arrival of a healthy baby.