I did not sleep that night. The letter sat under my kitchen lamp and I read those two lines until I knew them by heart. At first light I knelt down at my own fireplace, the one I had lit a hundred winters and never once looked at twice.
She was right. Down near the hearth, third brick from the left, one of them wiggled when I pressed it. My fingers shook so hard I could barely get a grip. I worked it loose and the whole brick slid into my hand, lighter than it had any right to be. Behind it was a hollow, and in the hollow sat a small tin, the kind that once held butter cookies.
I sat right down on the cold floor and opened it. Inside was money, folded bills held with a rubber band gone brittle, and under them a bank book with my own name printed across the front. I opened it and could not make sense of what I was seeing.
Every dollar I had ever waved off. Every single time I told Edith to save it, that she might need it one day, she had slipped next door when I was not looking and hidden it here, inside my own wall. Then, somewhere along the way, she had carried it to the bank and opened an account in my name and kept adding to it, year after year, quiet as a mouse.
A note was folded on top, in her careful hand. You told me to save it for the day I would need it, dear, so I saved it for the day you would.
The account had grown past eleven thousand dollars.
I pressed that little book to my chest and cried the way I had not cried since my husband passed. Not for the money, though the Lord knows a widow on a fixed income can use it. I cried because for seven years I believed I was the one doing the caring. All that while, in her own quiet way, she had been caring right back. She had watched me clear her walk and carry her bags, and she had turned every bit of it into a gift I would not find until she was gone.
I have not touched most of it. I paid off the last of what I owed on this house so no one can ever take it from me, and that is exactly what Edith would have wanted. The rest I left where it sits.
Every winter now I clear the walk for the young couple who moved into her place, the ones with the new baby. They try to pay me. I never take a cent.
Save it, I tell them. You might need it one day.
And somewhere, I am certain, Edith is smiling.