The manager rose from his desk, and by the time I understood what was happening, two officers were standing in the doorway of his office.
For a moment my stomach dropped. Then the manager explained, and I understood they had not come for me. They had come for Marcus.
The account the card opened was one my father had set up to pass directly to me on his death, payable to Daniel alone, untouchable by anyone else. And it carried a flag.
Because while our father lay in the hospital, my brother Marcus had come to this very bank with a power of attorney he had forged, trying to empty every account Dad had, and this one account had held firm because Dad had locked it down, and the bank had reported the forged document and been watching ever since.
Marcus had called the watch worthless scrap because he had already opened the back, found the card, taken it to the bank, and been turned away by an account he could not break. He threw it in the fire hoping the last proof would burn. He did not know Dad had wound a second truth in behind the gears, for me.
The sealed account held what Dad managed to protect, a good sum, set aside for the son who wound the watch beside him. And in the safe deposit box it also opened was the rest of it.
Records. Bank statements. The forged power of attorney itself, and a full accounting, in my father hand, of every dollar Marcus siphoned out of a dying man accounts while that man lay too sick to stop him.
Stealing from an incapacitated parent has a name in the law, and it is a serious one, and forging a power of attorney to a bank is another crime stacked on top. Dad had gathered the proof of both and left it where only I would find it.
Marcus was arrested. The money he emptied while Dad was in the hospital, the courts are clawing back now, dollar by dollar, and adding the weight of the forgery besides.
He does not smirk anymore, my brother. The last time I saw him, in a courtroom, he could not look at me. I did not gloat. Dad would not have wanted that. I only wanted what our father worked his whole life for kept out of a thief hands, and I got it.
The sealed account is mine. So is the truth. My father could not stop his own son from robbing him at the end, but he made certain the son who loved him would not be robbed too.
Dad wound that watch every morning of my life, even stopped, because it held more than the hour. It held the proof that saved me. Do not let your brother have this, he whispered. Only you. I kept it. And it kept me.