Turn 4 of 7

Retrieve your grandmother's coin box from beneath the counter

You kneel behind the counter and reach into the low shelf beneath the till. The box is where it has always been, pushed to the back behind a stack of receipt books and a jar of dried lavender that has lost its smell. It is oak, no larger than a cigar box, with a brass clasp that sticks unless you lift it and press at the same time. Your grandmother's handwriting is on the lid in faded ink: WEIGHTS, NOT MONEY. You have not opened it in three years, not since she passed, but your hands remember the trick of the clasp and it comes free with a soft click.

Inside, wrapped in squares of undyed cloth, are perhaps a dozen coins and tokens. Some you recognise — a foreign penny, a fairground token, a church medallion from the old county. Others you do not. The one you are looking for is at the bottom, wrapped in a scrap of linen that has gone soft with age. You unwrap it and hold it beside the coin Aldous brought, and the similarity is close enough to make your breath catch. The same tree, the same exposed roots, the same hand-struck irregularity along the edge. Your grandmother's coin is darker, tarnished with years, but the stamp is identical. You turn them both over and both reverses are blank, smooth, as though the metal was never meant to answer to anything but the one face.

"Where did you get that?" Aldous says. His voice has changed. The rehearsed steadiness is gone and what is left is raw, startled, the voice of a man who has just seen something he did not expect to see outside of his own head. He is leaning forward across the counter, his earlier caution forgotten, and his eyes are fixed on your grandmother's coin with an expression you can only describe as recognition.

"She called it a weight," you say. You do not elaborate. You are not yet sure how much to give this man, who arrived at your door at closing time with strange money and forest mud on his coat and a thing that follows him that he wants to rest.

Aldous straightens. He looks at you, then at the door, then at the coins lying side by side on the counter. His jaw works.

"I rendered a service," he says, and the words come slowly, as though he is picking them up from somewhere deep. "In the Underwood. I was asked to carry something out. I did not know what it was until afterward, and by then it was — I could not put it back."

In the back room, Iris's stool scrapes against the floor. You hear her stand, and you know she is deciding whether to step through the doorway. You have a moment, perhaps two, before this becomes a conversation that includes her, and you are not sure whether that is a good thing or a dangerous one.