“Nothing. Garbage. Meaningless.” She slammed the papers on the desk, not noticing how close she set them to the edge. They fluttered to the floor, and I flinched. This was going to be hell to clean up once she was finished, and it was unlikely that Katherine would stick around to help.

“Anything I can do, dear?” I stealthily picked up the fallen papers, trying to arrange them in a stack. Someone needed to get to this mess before Fredricka. That woman had enough on her plate.

“You can materialize the fucking key.” Katherine finished flipping through another handful of papers, then flung them onto the desk so they slid across the surface and flew onto the floor in front of me.

I bent over to pick up the new papers, and sorted them into the stack I already had in my hands. “I’m afraid I’m not much help there. I didn’t even know he locked those cabinets.”

Katherine disappeared behind the desk. She was all arms as she pulled random debris and homeless cables from drawers, scattering everything at her sides. “Yeah, and that just tells me he has something he wants to hide.”

“He was always particular about who went into his office.” One reason Hal didn’t care for Elias and his unwavering insistence on lingering in this room.

“But he didn’t use to lock everything up, did he?”

I honestly wasn’t sure. I had never investigated. Unlike Elias, I’d only had to be told once to stay the hell out of Hal’s office. It had been easier that way.

Katherine finished with the drawer and turned her attention to the top of the desk. She pushed more papers onto the floor. She shifted Hal’s monitor to the side in a way that made me flinch. She lifted the keyboard and kicked up the layer of dust that had settled over it. She waved a hand in front of her face, fighting back a sneeze.

“Don’t you guys ever clean in here?” she asked, grabbing a cup of pens from the top of the desk and tipping it upside down. Pens clattered across the desk, then tumbled to the floor.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, counted to ten. I tried not to think about how angry Hal would be if he saw this scene.

Katherine lifted a letter tray off of the desk and shook it upside down over the floor. More papers scattered across the floor in a puff of dust.

Chamomile tea,I willed, wishing that somehow Fredricka could hear my thoughts. When this is over, I need a cup of chamomile tea.

Katherine sat back behind the desk. She gazed upon her mess.

“Fuck this,” she said after a moment, hoisting herself from the floor and storming out of the room.

I gathered the pens one by one, putting them back in the cup. The letter tray had broken apart when Katherine tossed it to the side and I investigated the pieces, trying to fit the top of the tray back onto the bottom. It looked like a little plastic latch had broken, but maybe if I glued it?.?.?.

Katherine burst back into the room. “Mom, did you know you have water boiling on the stove?”

For chamomile tea, I hoped.

“Anyway, I turned it off. Seriously, Mom, you need to pay more attention.” Katherine herself did not seem to be paying much attention, even to her own words. She made a beeline for the cabinets behind Hal’s desk, brandishing something in her hand.

The crowbar.

I dropped the letter tray. It cracked apart further. “What the hell, Katherine? Where did you find that?” I had stored it under the sink after the unfortunate basement blessing. Had she gone through the kitchen cabinets this morning? How much of this house did she plan on investigating?

“It was on the counter, Mom.” She knelt down by the cabinets.

Goddamnit, Fredricka.She and I would need to have another conversation about our respective definitions of “helpful” behavior.

Katherine positioned the crowbar in between two of the locked cabinet doors. She slapped at the curved edge with the heel of her hand, firmly jamming the sharp point in between the doors. I saw the wood scrape and chip around it.

I darted to her side. “Katherine?.?.?.”

Katherine made a twisting motion with her arms and the sharp edge dug deeper into the space between the cabinet doors. I heard a cracking noise as the wood started to splinter.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Be careful.” We had spent a lot of money on those cabinets. They were exactly as Hal had dreamed—thick, bright wood, with ornate designs carved into the exterior of each door. Oh, Hal would be mad. He would be so mad.

Katherine wasn’t listening. She grunted and planted a foot against the base of the cabinets, using her body weight as leverage as she yanked at the crowbar. More cracking noises. A shard of wood flew off the door.

“Katherine, wait!” Another shard of wood landed near my hand. “Shit. These cabinets were expensive, Katherine.”

“Sorry.” Katherine heaved, breath heavy as she struggled, not very sorry at all. “I don’t think?.?.?. there’s any other?.?.?. choice.” She let out a yell, yanking at the crowbar with the strength of an Olympic rowing team and the door finally gave way, splintering around the lock and swinging open.

The cabinet was filled with empty bottles.

“Jesus Christ.” Katherine’s face sparkled with sweat. She wiped at her brow, eyes wide and mouth agape as she stared into the cabinet. She reached in and grabbed a bottle. Jack Daniel’s. That was Hal’s brand all right. Katherine turned her dumbfounded gaze towards me, handed me the bottle. Unsure of what to do, I took it from her. “Did you know?” she asked.

“I?.?.?.” I didn’t know. Hadn’t known. After last September, Hal had spent increasing amounts of time in his office. He sometimes slept in here, slumped over his desk. He always kept the door closed, and—given how clearly he had expressed his feelings about people entering his office—that was as good as a dead bolt. I never bothered him. That was the rule.

He’d mumbled something or other about working on a new novel. I had an inkling that there wasn’t any new novel—he never shared any details about it or let me read a few draft chapters like he usually did—but I believed him anyway. When Hal told you something, you listened. You believed him.

“I didn’t know,” I said quietly. For the first time since Katherine had arrived, I heard honesty in my voice. My voice wasn’t that of a concerned mother trying to keep her daughter from being sad or afraid, but of a woman who had just learned something earth-shattering, like that mole people lived under the earth’s crust and they were not friendly, or that stepping on cracks—in fact—did break backs.

Katherine let out a breath filled with the kind of relief of someone who had been expecting terrible news for quite some time and the world had finally delivered.

We sat in silence, both staring at the bottle. I turned it over in my hand. A tiny droplet of amber liquid moved about in the bottom, a leftover hardly worth remembering. How long had it taken him to finish this bottle, locked up in the office by himself? No ice in here, just warm whiskey, neat. Had he used a glass, or drunk straight from the bottle, not in the mood to pretend anymore?

Katherine’s attention drifted back towards the cabinets. “Look at all these,” she said, pulling the empty bottles out of the cabinet one by one. “One, two, three, four?.?.?.” She handed the empties to me as she pulled them out. Unsure of what she wanted me to do with them, I started lining them up alongside the desk.

Katherine pulled open the adjoining cabinet door, free to move now that its partner had been unceremoniously broken open. This cabinet was filled with bottles too, also empty. “Son of a bitch,” she hissed, yanking at the bottles with much less care. The glass clattered; a bottle tipped over and landed on the floor with the Jack Daniel’s label faceup.

“Katherine, careful.” I reached a hand into the cabinet to steady the wavering bottles. “We don’t want broken glass everywhere.”

Katherine was still counting. “Seven, eight, nine?.?.?.”

Maybe I had known. The way you can know something without really being aware of it. The little part of you that, every day, is aware that, at some point in the future, your body will cease to be alive and the cause of it all could be natural and peaceful or violent and quite unpleasant indeed—but still you keep dusting the picture frames and going to the post office to pick up stamps, largely unperturbed by your knowledge. Living with Hal for so long, of course I knew what whiskey smelled like behind a closed door. I knew what it meant when Hal’s eyes were only raised to half-mast and he tripped into walls. I knew what it meant when I heard wet, choking coughs coming from the bathroom late at night. I knew that, even though for years it had seemed that all this had been straightened out, these things were cyclical.

“Son of a bitch.”Katherine grabbed the crowbar from the floor and swung herself towards the adjoining cabinets. It took only one violent twist of her arms for the crowbar to crack the doors open.

More bottles. Empty.

“Fuck.”Katherine snaked her arm behind the bottles and pulled them out in one sweeping motion before turning her attention to the final set of cabinets. The bottles clattered and bounced on the floor. The fact that none shattered was something of a miracle.

Fredricka might have known too, not that we had talked about it directly. Fredricka and Hal had never formed much of a relationship, and she tended to steer clear of him, electing to do her chores only after he left the room. She rarely even referred to him by name, called him simply “ma’am’s husband” when talking to me. One day, while I was sitting in my studio, trying to paint while ignoring loud thumping and crashing from Hal’s office above, Fredricka appeared behind me. A leopard cannot change his spots, she said before moving into the living room to fluff the pillows.

Can’t imagine why he’d want to,I thought. The spots are part of what makes leopards so beautiful.

Katherine cracked open the third set of cabinets. The door blocked my view, but, based on her reaction, I assumed this cabinet was filled with bottles as well. I busied myself with tidying the empties that clattered onto the floor while Katherine cursed beside me. It would seem I was done telling her to watch her language for the day.

Katherine held out a bottle to me, her fist clenched around its neck. This one still had whiskey in it, a band of amber that swirled around the bottom third of the bottle. “We found where he left off,” she said.

I didn’t count the bottles, but I’m sure Katherine had an accurate tally in her mind. She might’ve even been able to calculate how quickly Hal had been finishing off these bottles if she had known when he started drinking. I didn’t know the precise date myself, but I had a sense he had begun immediately after last September.

Katherine pulled a book out of the cabinet and examined it, her brow furrowed. She handed the book to me. The Shadows and You: How to Cope with Mental Illness.

“What’s that all about?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I said.

I was still staring at the book in my hand, cursing Hal for his lack of faith and his damning choice in literature, when I heard Katherine laugh beside me. It was a thin, desperate laugh, like she had been given the choice between laughing and sobbing and reluctantly chosen the former. I looked over at her, and she had a cigar box open in her lap. The lid obscured my view of its contents.

“What do you have there?” I asked.

She laughed harder, then tossed the container onto the floor in front of me. A rainbow of shimmering coins bounced from the box, glinting as they rained onto the floor.

“His goddamn AA chips,” she said.