The Bookbinder Opened The Drawer My Aunt Had Never Noticed

Tobias Finch answered his shop door holding a paste brush and looking for his glasses. They hung from a cord against his shirt.

"I put them somewhere safe," he said.

I pointed.

"Ah. Too safe."

He was sixty-eight, a white American man with pink cheeks, thin gray hair, and an apron full of paper scraps. Grandpa had trusted him with torn charts, ship logs, and books whose backs had split like old hulls.

The shop stood above a short flight of steps. Rain ticked against its front window. Tobias moved three empty cups off a chair before asking me to sit.

"Your aunt called," he said.

"About the register?"

"About a leather album. She described it as personal family property."

"What did you tell her?"

"That leather is a covering. It doesn't decide who owns the paper."

He found his keys in a tin labeled Broken Clasps. Then he opened an iron drawer beneath the cutting bench.

The blue register was wrapped in clean cotton. I knew its faded spine. Grandpa had brought it home each spring, checked it against my inventory, and returned it here.

I had thought Tobias was keeping it flat while the binding cured.

"He asked me to hold the originals," Tobias said. "He didn't want loose pages in the damp."

Inside were the signed trust, its original property schedule, and the later amendment. Each had its own numbered pocket. A receipt listed every page Tobias had accepted.

He turned straight to pocket seven.

"March twelfth. Just before lunch. Nora Lane witnessed with me. Your grandfather complained that my clock was eight minutes fast. It was nine."

He could forget a cup while drinking from it. He remembered a signing as if the table still stood before him.

I read the amendment twice.

It confirmed that all thirty-six models listed in Schedule A belonged to the trust. It confirmed the boathouse as their permanent home and a public study archive. And it confirmed me as successor trustee when Grandpa died.

The trust gave no family member a right to divide or sell the collection. A court could approve a move if the building became unsafe, with public access kept in place.

Grandpa had planned for storms. He had also planned for relatives.

I laid my hand beside his signature without touching the ink.

"She said I was just his assistant."

Tobias gave me a tissue from a box filled with loose pencils.

"He said you understood the difference between keeping a thing and owning it."

The amendment set a conservator's wage at $31,200 a year for three days each week. The trustee had to keep accounts and get an outside review of any pay to herself. There was no back pay and no gift of the fund to me.

There was work. There was a way to keep doing it.

The latest account statement showed $612,480 in trust funds. The operating plan set aside $12,800 a year for basic building and collection costs, apart from wages.

I had spent two weeks wondering how to pay the winter heating bill.

"Why didn't he tell me the final numbers?"

"He meant to. Then he got tired. You kept telling him there was tomorrow."

I pressed the tissue into a small square.

We called Mara. She asked Tobias to bring the register himself so she could record where it had been kept. Before he closed it, he found another envelope.

"This belongs with the sales matter," he said.

It held a letter Grandpa had sent to Glass Harbor eight months before his death. He had refused a private sale and enclosed copies of the trust's title page and property schedule.

A delivery receipt bore Caleb Rusk's name.

"He knew," I said.

"He received it," Tobias said. "That's what the paper proves."

I liked that correction. It gave my anger a straight edge.

At Mara's office, Tobias handed over the register against a signed receipt. Mara scanned each page while we watched.

"Your aunt's will may be real," she said. "It still can't give her these trust assets. We'll seek an order confirming your authority and protecting the collection."

I showed her the $42,000 invoice.

She put it in a separate folder.

"Now we ask what your aunt promised in exchange."

My phone buzzed before she finished speaking. A neighbor had sent me a screenshot from Glass Harbor's online catalog.

There was Grandpa's coastal steamer, with my blue repair thread visible through the glass.

Below it, the listing announced a private preview at the boathouse the following morning.

At the bottom was one line in bold: Access Guaranteed By The Owner, Eunhee Choi.