I leaned toward my neighbor, but my eyes once again fell involuntarily into the hole. There, at the bottom, among the loose soil, something was visible that sent a chill down my spine.

At first, I thought they were roots. But looking closer, I realized: it was the outline of a wooden chest, almost completely covered with earth. At that moment my neighbor groaned and half-opened her eyes.

Her lips whispered: “Don’t you dare…” — and then closed weakly again. I froze. What was she hiding?

A few minutes later, when the ambulance took her away, I couldn’t get her words out of my head: “Don’t you dare…”

Later I learned from acquaintances the details: her husband had died a few months earlier.

Before his death, he had called her to his side and confessed that during their marriage he had made deals whose income could not be officially declared. All that money he had hidden right in the yard, buried in a wooden chest.

But he hadn’t managed to say exactly where. In his last moment, he had only reached out his hand toward the garden… and then passed away.

Since then, his wife had been almost obsessively searching for that spot. Day after day she dug in the same place, hoping her memory had not failed her. And now, it seemed, she was finally very close.