It started because our mum was moving up north with her new fella, and my brother, thirty-four years old, full-time man-child, had promised to come help pack up the house. Promised twice. Showed up zero times.

So me and mum cleared out his old room ourselves. Most of it went to the charity shop. The big stuffed bear he'd won at a fairground years back was heading the same way, until I got a petty little idea. I hauled it upstairs for a photo. Going to send it to him with the caption: wish you'd bothered coming, don't you?

That's when I felt it.

Something stiff and lumpy, down in the base of the thing. I had a look.

Nearly twenty thousand pounds. Mostly crisp hundreds, rubber-banded, tucked up inside the bear like he was the world's worst financial advisor. A few crumpled old notes near the top, probably from when my brother was a teenager and thought this was clever. The rest looked fresh. Bank fresh. From what I could piece together later, he'd been quietly squirrelling it away when his marriage hit a rough patch, in case things went sideways and he needed a running fund his wife didn't know about.

They sorted things out. The money stayed in the bear. The bear stayed in his childhood bedroom. And then he didn't come to help pack.

I put the cash in the safe at my workshop and waited.

For a week, he rang round asking vague questions about what we'd done with his stuff. Never once just asking about the bear directly. You could hear him trying to reverse-engineer the conversation toward it without having to say the thing out loud.

I'll be honest, I enjoyed it more than I should have.

Eventually I sat down to write the whole thing out in an email to a advice column, fully expecting someone to tell me I was being reasonable. They didn't, really. And I suppose seeing it written down made it obvious I was starting to be a bit of a prat about it.

I called him before I even sent the email.

He was relieved in that very specific way men are relieved when they've been quietly terrified for days and won't admit it. Turns out there was no great reason for the bear-bank. He'd just liked the idea of having money his wife couldn't find. Which, honestly, makes him more of an idiot than I'd given him credit for.

As a thank you, or maybe as a kind of admission, he said I could keep the bear.

It's on a shelf in the workshop now. Empty, obviously.

Ever sat on a secret about someone for just a beat too long, then had to quietly admit you were enjoying it a bit too much? Tell us below.