Still, he couldn’t let go. That night, surrounded by scattered notes, he noticed something he had missed: a sequence of numbers aligned not with words, but with lines of the deed itself. Skipping whole sentences, the pattern shifted again, pointing him farther east—toward a patch where earth had sunken oddly.
The depression lay between two leaning apple trees, their branches gnarled and lifeless. The ground looked disturbed, as if settling over something long forgotten. Andrew’s breath caught. It felt right in a way the other spots hadn’t, a final convergence of Henry’s puzzle with the land’s quiet testimony.