At first glance, it looked like nothing, just years of grocery receipts, bus tickets, random slips of paper.
I almost laughed.
“Seriously?” I whispered.
But then something caught my eye.
Inside wasn’t food.
On one of the receipts, a single digit in the middle was circled.
I picked up another one.
Same thing, but a different number.
My breathing slowed.
I spread them out on the bench and noticed that every receipt had a single number circled.
Never the price nor the date.
These were specific digits and clearly not random.
Grandpa didn’t do random.
I picked up another one.
I stayed there for hours, organizing them.
Lining them up by date, then by store.
It didn’t click right away. At first, I thought they were totals, then dates, then phone numbers. None of it worked.
After some trial and error and a few wrong assumptions, I eventually saw it.
The numbers formed groups!
And when I wrote them out in his empty notebook in sequence, they looked familiar.
They were coordinates!
It didn’t click right away.
I sat back, staring at the page in the notebook.
“No way.”
But it finally made sense.
When I was a kid, Grandpa used to leave me little notes. Clues. Tiny scavenger hunts around the house and yard.
“Go find it,” he’d say with a grin.
I hadn’t thought about that in years.
This… this felt the same.
Only bigger.
I gathered everything back into the lunch box and headed home.
It finally made sense.
That night, I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop open.
The house was still unoccupied, and I assumed my siblings had returned home. Grandpa’s house was my home until Matthew took over.
I typed in the first set of numbers.
A location popped up on the map. Downtown.
I entered the second one. Another location across town.
By the time I finished, I had five points marked across the city.
I typed in the first set of numbers.
I leaned back in my chair, heart pounding.
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