When the tears finally slowed, I reached into my purse for my wallet. I looked at the few things I still had: a driver’s license with an address that no longer felt like mine, a nearly empty checking account, a couple of wrinkled receipts, and that black metal card.
I turned it over in my fingers, studying the small eagle-and-shield crest again. It felt expensive, secretive, and entirely out of place in the life I thought my father had lived. My checking account had one hundred thirty-eight dollars in it. I had been out of work for two years. I had nowhere to go.
For the first time that night, fear pushed past grief. Not the fear of losing Ryan—that loss had already happened—but the practical terror of what came next. Where would I sleep? What would I do tomorrow? How did a woman rebuild a life when she had been pushed out of it with a suitcase and a warning from a dead man?