“Insurance for what?”
He considered the question with his usual patience, as though testing several versions of the answer against some internal standard before selecting one. “For life,” he said finally. “If the world ever pushes you into a corner so deep you cannot climb out by yourself, bring this to Ironcrest Bank.”
She laughed. She was ten, and the idea of needing that kind of insurance felt as remote as retirement or getting a mortgage or any of the other abstract grown-up catastrophes that adults worried about.
“What will it do?”
“Hopefully,” he said, sliding the card across the table to her, “you’ll never find out.”
She had tucked it into a small tin box she kept on her childhood dresser alongside a broken compass and a collection of interesting stones. When she grew up and moved away and the tin box was packed into a cardboard box and the cardboard box moved from apartment to apartment and eventually sat unopened in the back of a closet, the card moved with it without her thinking about it. When the closet was emptied in the eviction and the cardboard boxes shoved hastily into the purse she grabbed on the way out the door, the card traveled with her into the purse lining without her knowing. And now here it was, cold in her hand, on the morning when she had finally said out loud that she had run out of options.
She looked at it for a long time in the early light.
Ironcrest Bank, he had said.
She looked it up on her phone, the battery at six percent, found an address twelve blocks away, and started walking.
The lobby of Ironcrest National Bank was marble and warm air and the muffled quiet of a place designed to communicate stability. People moved through it with the purposeful unhurriedness of those who belong in large, well-appointed rooms. Clara stood just inside the revolving door for a moment after they came through, and she closed her eyes.
