Because there, resting in the hollow above my linen closet, was a small trunk.
Old, leather-strapped, tucked up into the rafters where no one would ever think to look. It had been set there long before my time, before all forty-two years of my family in that house, by the old widower who died in it with no one to leave it to.
I got it down and worked the straps loose, and my knees near gave out.
Money. Savings bonds, a whole banded stack of them, some of them older than I am. And beneath the bonds, a bundle of letters tied in a faded blue ribbon.
The letters were between the old widower and his wife, gone before him. Love letters, decades of them, from a courtship and a marriage and a long life together, saved up and hidden away where his grief could keep them safe.
The last letter was one he wrote to her after she died, telling her he had put their whole life up in the rafters where it would be warm and dry, and that he hoped whoever found it would understand that a love like theirs was too precious to leave lying where just anyone might throw it out.
I sat down on that step stool and cried for two people I never met.
The bonds, when I took them to the bank, had matured into a sum that made the young teller go quiet. I went to the county first, the way you should, and asked them to search for any family the old widower might have had. They found no one. He had died alone, his wife gone before him, no children, no kin. The house and all it held had come to my husband and me, free and clear, back in 1983.
So the money was mine. But the letters were not, not really. They belonged to a love story, and a love story deserves better than a rafter.
I gave the letters to the local historical society, who keep such things safe and let the world remember that ordinary people loved each other extraordinarily. They are cared for now, read now, honored now.
The money I split among my four children and their children, and I told them the whole story, so that every one of them knows their good fortune came from an old man who loved his wife so much he hid their life in the ceiling to keep it safe.
Forty-two years I stacked towels under that closet and never knew a love story slept above my head. I know now. And it made me hold my own memories a little closer, the forty-two years my husband and I had in that house, which were, I see now, their own kind of treasure, hidden in plain sight the whole time.