What We Buried Under the Pyramid

Margot found her father's pyramid scheme files the morning after the funeral. She should have been grieving, but instead she was calculating how many seniors he'd bilked out of their retirement savings. Her mother had been making him spinach salad every Thursday for thirty years, oblivious to the source of their comfort—stolen pensions, hollow promises, the kind of lies that fester like untreated wounds.

A black cat had taken to sleeping on her father's grave. Margot visited every evening at dusk, leaving small offerings. The cat reminded her of her father's stubbornness, his refusal to ever admit he was wrong. Like the time he'd insisted on buying her a ridiculous felt hat for her wedding—something from an old western, ten gallon monstrosity—just to prove he could still surprise her. She'd worn it to spite herself, to prove she could accept him on his terms.

"You're full of bull," he'd told her once, when she'd confronted him about the pyramid scheme. He'd said it with affection, as if she were just like him. The bull of his denial stood strong until the very end.

She'd been speaking with the FBI for weeks now. They wanted her testimony, but something held her back. Not loyalty—something more complicated. The knowledge that pulling one thread would unravel everything: her mother's peaceful delusions, the house they'd loved, the carefully constructed reality of three decades.

The cat watched her with amber eyes as she knelt by the grave. Margot reached into her pocket and pulled out a flash drive. The evidence. The truth. She'd copied it from his office before the authorities arrived. Now she understood what he'd meant about the weight of knowledge. It sat in her palm like a living thing.

She placed the flash drive in the dirt beside the cat. "You decide," she whispered. The cat sniffed it once, then curled around it, closing its eyes.

Margot stood, her mother's spinach dinner waiting at home, another lie in a lifetime of necessary deceptions. Some truths, she decided, belonged to the dead—and to the cats who guarded their secrets.