The lower price was written in her father's hand. The higher one belonged to the market stallholder. When Zia found the receipt after his death, she assumed he had altered it to conceal what he spent.
The stallholder remembered the purchase: a repaired cabinet for Zia's first home. He reduced the price after her father helped carry furniture during a busy morning. The lower amount was genuine, and her father wrote it on the receipt because the original label remained attached.
A note on the reverse listed the shelves Zia wanted. He had sketched their spacing while listening to her describe a room he had not yet seen. The paper preserved planning that never became part of the family's story about an unexpectedly cheap cabinet.
Zia measured the shelves in her current house. They still matched the sketch. She kept the receipt inside the cabinet, with a plain account of the exchange. The two prices no longer looked like competing truths. One was the original offer; the other reflected the work someone did to make the gift possible.