Page 107 of The Woman in the Garage

“What is it?” I asked. I looked between Santo and Luca, who were leading me into a building at the docks.

I hadn’t even been able to take in the scale of their operation—the hundreds or maybe even thousands of shipping containers piled all around, the men milling about working, the forklifts, the freighters pulling up and waiting to be unloaded—beforethey ushered me inside, then back into a windowless room featuring a long table.

And on that table?

Money.

Just piles and piles and piles of money.

“Is that real?” My voice gasped out of me as my brain refused to compute the amount that was laid out before me.

“It is,” Luca said.

“We checked every single bill to make sure,” Santo added.

“What… how… who…” Not a single thought was completing itself in my mind.

“What… about sixty million. Who… it’s all yours. And how, well,” Santo said, reaching for something in his pocket and then handing me an envelope. “This will explain it all much better than I can.”

“What is it?” I asked.

My name was scrawled on the front in blocky penmanship.

“It’s a letter from your uncle explaining everything.”

I barely got one sentence in before I found myself sinking into one of the seats around the table. A mix of shock and grief tore through me as I read my uncle’s words.

He recalled me coming to live with him, how my presence had given him a purpose his life had never had before. How sad he was to see me go, but how thankful he’d been for our time together.

He maybe had some choice things to say about my father that—while harsh—were valid.

And those feelings about my father were what eventually fueled his goal in life.

Not necessarily to leave me a crumbling house and a repair shop he knew I’d have no passion for.

But the ability to never have to worry about money again, to be so wealthy that I could simply live a life of leisure and pleasure.

He’d confessed to some greedy motivations—paying off his house and the mortgage on the shop. But everything beyond that went to reinvesting in more drugs… or piling cash up to let me inherit.

He begged me to not tell the police since ‘all the crimes are done, and if you’re reading this, the guiltiest party is already dead.’

Then he demanded I sell the shop and distance myself from David and the mechanics because he had lost a lot of trust in them over the years.

‘Most of ‘em are just idiots. But David can’t be trusted.’

Boy, did that part prove true.

“We think he was divesting,” Santo told me after I finished reading. I reached up to wipe a tear off my cheek.

I didn’t know my uncle well. I was embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t even given him much thought in the past few years. While he’d been working hard to secure an easier future for me.

“What do you mean?”

“From what we can tell from our records, he got a shipment roughly every four months. But there was no shipment before he died. And there should have been,” Luca explained.

“That’s why most of the units were full of cash instead of drugs,” Santo said. “He was done and just wanted to sell off the rest of the product and move on.”

“But David and the other mechanics…”

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