The Last Seed Phrase

“He could have made it easier,” thought Sylvia Gordon.

She put down the basket of clothes and moved towards the window.

It had been just over two months now since her father had passed away. After the funeral and the period of mourning, she had finally faced up to the task of going through his things and tidying up his house.

It fell to her to prepare the house for sale, rummaging through his possessions to see what was worth salvaging, what could go to charity and what simply needed to be tossed out.

Sylvia had barely seen her father these past few years, and finally, just as she was coming to terms with her life and the absence of a father, she got the call about his death from Sergio Bellini, one of her father’s business partners, of all people. For her, it was another sign that her father had faded into the background of her life, like an oil painting on a hotel wall that you only notice in passing.

All those years he had been too busy to see her, living his dream life in the Bahamas or Thailand or Luxembourg. She knew of him through his Instagram reels, always with the same lifestyle platitudes about living the good life. But now her thoughts darkened. She wondered what it might have been like if he had come to see her paintings in the gallery, or simply met up with her for a coffee from time to time. After he had left their mother to live his dream of travelling the world and working independently as a software engineer, his contact with Sylvia was insubstantial and superficial: the occasional email, WhatsApp or text, barely a call, and rarely, if ever, in person.

She thought she was reconciled to all this, but now that she was standing in his house, a deep sadness gripped her, as though a gaping hole had opened in her heart. She had never been here before, and she wondered what life had been like for her father outside the Instagram reels. It was a small two-bedroom weatherboard, more a shack than a house, a place he only visited sporadically in between his lifestyle jaunts.

She had buried the pain of his absence in many ways: at first some short-term relationships, some substance abuse and her perpetual money worries.

It was only in the last year or so that she had managed to find some peace and get her life back on track. Before that, it had been a succession of struggles and a wilful refusal to accept the pain of his absence.

Altschmerz. She had come across that word the other day while scrolling aimlessly on Facebook. It was the feeling of going over the same ground, experiencing the same old anxieties day after day, but being unable to do anything about it.

She had gone through his clothing and his bedroom, but because this was essentially his home away from his peripatetic home, there wasn’t much to look at: some old tracksuits, some undergarments and socks.

What was she looking for? Was she hoping he had left some memento for her, a series of diary entries, or letters he had thought of sending her but which remained unsent? Or was there to be a collage of photos showing how much he really cared?

As much as this need for personal reassurance affected her, she was also looking for something else. Even though she had turned her life around, she was by no means financially independent. More than anything, she wished to devote herself to her art, and the thought of continuing as a struggling artist didn’t really appeal to her.

She knew her father had been involved in bitcoin in the early years, before anyone else had heard of it and before mass adoption. Of course, at the time she had shown scant interest. Why would anyone want bitcoin when you couldn’t spend it? What she wanted was cash, and he never seemed to give her any when she needed it most. But then again, that was what had given her the determination to stand on her own. That being said, now that she knew the worth of a fraction of a bitcoin, let alone a whole one, the possibility that her father had some secret bitcoin stash was not something she could dismiss lightly.

That, in part, explained Sergio’s manner. The call in which he broke the news had been perfunctory and lacking in empathy. Rather than expressing sorrow, he seemed more intent on asking her obtuse questions about passwords and arcane technology, and rather than seeking to reassure her as she began to cry, he tried to arrange a meeting, as if he needed some special information from her. In the week that followed came a barrage of phone calls and emails, all of them seeking something called a “seed phrase”. He kept saying that the business owned the assets, that there were shared amounts of bitcoin invested, and that he was entitled to them as part of the estate settlement. However, the fact that he didn’t know the seed phrase to her father’s wallet suggested two things: that her father must have had a fair amount of bitcoin, and that none of it belonged to Sergio.