The receipt was dated a week after her father's death. Talia found it in the pocket of his coat and immediately checked the printed year. She had worn the coat only once, to collect papers from his flat, and remembered taking the inland road.
On the reverse was a shopping list in her brother's handwriting. He had borrowed the coat during the days after the funeral, driven across the causeway and bought supplies for their mother. Neither sibling remembered the coat changing hands. Its familiar weight had become a shared comfort during a week they could barely reconstruct.
Talia had begun the morning expecting a disturbing secret. Instead, the receipt gave her a small account of care performed while she was elsewhere. She telephoned her brother and asked what the final item meant. It was the brand of tea their father always bought, misspelled because nobody had needed to write it down before.
She left the receipt in the pocket. The date no longer made her uneasy. It marked the first week in which the family had to learn each other's habits without the person who used to remember them all.