After my mother’s funeral, I inherited her favorite but old painting, while my sister got her three vacation homes…

After my mother’s funeral, I inherited her favorite but old painting, about a sister, her three vacation homes. My husband tore the painting off the wall and threw it at my feet. «You and this junk are worth each other!» he yelled.

The frame cracked. When I picked it up, a key fell out of the crack. I didn’t know what it was from, but when I looked closer at it, I froze in place, seeing.

But before all this happened, there was the stuffy notary’s office, the smell of old paper, and a tense, thick silence. It had been just three days after the funeral. Three days that blurred into one gray, viscous dream.

Elena Harper sat on a hard chair upholstered in cracked faux leather, looking at her hands folded in her lap. She expected nothing. Mom had lived modestly, almost ascetically, especially in recent years.

What inheritance could there be? It was just a formality to observe. Next to her sat her twin sister Olivia. Straight back, perfect hairstyle, expensive perfume smelling sharp and trendy, which didn’t fit the mourning at all.

Olivia impatiently tapped her manicured nail on the handle of her bag. She looked straight at the notary, an elderly tired man in glasses, who monotonously read their mother’s last will. Elena felt out of place in this performance.

Olivia was a person of action, a person of results. Even grief she processed business-like, quickly switching from organizing the funeral to dividing the little that was left. Elena still couldn’t believe Mom was gone.

That no one would call her in the evening anymore to ask if she was dressed warmly enough. A land plot with a cabin in the Veterans Community Association, the notary droned without expression. A land plot with a house in the Forest Glades suburb.

As well as a land plot with buildings at Birch Shore address. All the above-mentioned property I bequeath to my elder daughter Olivia Patton. Olivia straightened up even more slightly.

The corner of her mouth twitched in a semblance of a satisfied smile, which she immediately hid, making a sorrowful face. Three vacation homes. Elena knew them.

One old, still from Grandpa, the other two Mom bought in the last 10 years, explaining it as a good investment. Elena was surprised then where her modest pensioner mother got such money, but Mom just waved it off, saying she had saved all her life. The notary turned the page.

Elena felt a chill run down her spine. She knew what was coming. Now her husband Alex, waiting for news at home, would get confirmation of all his worst expectations.

He already thought her mother-in-law was strange, and now to my younger daughter Elena Harper continued the notary, and his voice seemed even more colorless, I bequeath the only thing that was truly dear to me. The painting «Autumn Landscape» by an unknown artist in a wooden frame. Silence fell.

Olivia threw Elena a quick, almost disdainful glance. It said everything: pity and superiority. A painting.

That very dark, almost brown from time, one that hung in Mom’s bedroom over the dresser. The landscape was completely ordinary, withered forest, gray sky. Nothing special.

Just part of the interior, familiar from childhood. Elena nodded silently. She felt no offense.

Rather some bitter tenderness. Mom really loved this painting. She often stood in front of it, just looking, thinking about something.

Maybe some memories were connected to it that she never told about. For Elena, this was Mom’s last gift, her piece. And that was more important than any vacation homes.

The way home seemed like eternity. The painting wasn’t very big, but heavy and awkward. Elena pressed it to her chest, feeling the hard edges of the old frame.

She imagined Alex’s face. His hopes for his mother-in-law’s treasures were almost tangible. He worked as a manager in a construction firm, always chasing status, expensive things, the appearance of success.

They lived in a mortgaged apartment, and every penny counted. And here three vacation homes floated to Olivia. She opened the door with her key.

Alex was in the living room. He wasn’t sitting, but pacing the room. Seeing her with the painting in her hands, he froze.

Well? His voice was tense, like a taut string. Elena put the painting by the wall. Carefully, as if it was something fragile and alive.

Olivia got all three vacation homes, she said quietly, trying not to let her voice tremble. Alex was silent for a few seconds, looking at her. His face turned purple.

And you? He squeezed through his teeth. Elena nodded at the painting. This.

Mom wrote that this is the most precious thing she had. Alex looked at the dark canvas. Then at Elena again.

And suddenly he laughed. Loudly, angrily, without a drop of amusement. It was a bark, not laughter.

A painting? This daub is the most precious? She’s mocking us even from beyond the grave. He stepped toward the painting. Elena instinctively jerked to shield it.

Alex, don’t. It’s a memory. But he wasn’t listening anymore.

He was furious. Furious from deceived expectations, from collapsed plans for easy money, for selling at least one plot. He grabbed the painting.

Elena clutched the frame, trying to hold it. Let go! he snarled. The forces were unequal.

He yanked the painting from her hands so roughly that she flew to the wall. And then with some animal growl, he lifted it over his head and threw it on the floor with all his might. There was a deafening crack.

The painting fell flat. The massive wooden frame, already old, cracked at the corner, exposing light wood. You and this junk are worth each other! he shouted in her face.

Then he turned, grabbed his jacket from the hanger, and slamming the front door so that the dishes in the kitchen rattled, left. Elena was left alone in the deafening silence. She slowly sank to the floor next to the mutilated thing.

Tears streamed down her cheeks, but she didn’t notice them. It hurt not because he broke the painting. It hurt from his words.

From how easily he trampled the only thing that connected her to her mother. She ran her hand over the crack in the frame. Splinters dug into her fingers.

Elena picked up the painting to inspect the damage. And at that moment, something small metallic slipped out of the split wood and fell on the parquet with a quiet ring. She froze.

She bent down and picked up the object. It was a small heavy brass key. Antique, with an ornate head.

Probably from Mom’s jewelry box or an old dresser that was thrown out long ago. Elena turned it in her fingers. Another useless thing, another memory.

She was about to put it in her pocket and forget when suddenly a ray of light from the window fell on the key at a different angle. Something was engraved on the flat part of the head. Some letters.

Elena brought the key closer to her eyes, wiped it with her sleeve. The engraving was small, almost worn away by time, but it could be made out. An elegant ornate logo and two words below it.

She read them again and again, not believing her eyes. Her breath caught. Her hands grew cold.

On the metal was clearly stamped Appalachian Gems. This name was known throughout the country, though the enterprise itself hadn’t existed for decades—a legendary closed government jewelry association from the Cold War era. It didn’t just produce jewelry for the party elite.

It was famous for its vaults where the political and scientific elite kept their private collections—valuables they didn’t trust to ordinary savings banks. Appalachian Gems was synonymous not just with wealth, but with secret, enormous wealth. Elena sat on the floor in the middle of the apartment, clutching the cold metal in her palm.

The world narrowed to this small key. It couldn’t be from an old dresser. It was from something entirely different.

From a door behind which hid something that her modest, quiet mother had hidden so carefully that she entrusted this secret only to the cracked frame of an old, unwanted painting. Elena froze in place, realizing that the inheritance she received was not at all what it seemed. Elena didn’t sleep all night.

She sat in the kitchen, locking the door with the bolt, and looked at the small brass key lying on the table. Alex hadn’t returned. Maybe he went to friends, maybe to his parents to complain about his worthless wife and her crazy mother.

Elena didn’t care. The whole world, her whole life, shrank to this tiny heavy piece of metal. She kept picking it up, feeling the cold and the ridged surface of the engraving.

Appalachian Gems. It didn’t fit in her head. Her mom, a quiet, unassuming woman who worked all her life in a library, and this name, a symbol of American luxury and secret power during the Cold War.

How could these two worlds intersect? Before dawn, she stood up. She needed to hide the key and the painting. She carefully picked up the mutilated canvas from the floor, trying not to look at the split corner.

She wrapped it in an old blanket and shoved it under the bed in the linen drawer. It wasn’t secure. But she couldn’t think of a better place…