My father threw me out on my eighteenth birthday, stole the $3,000 I’d saved from working after school, and used it for my stepbrother. Nine days later, while I was digging through a restaurant dumpster for something to eat, a stranger in an expensive suit called my name and told me my supposedly dead grandfather had left me everything. But there was one condition nobody had warned me about.

“Dad, what did you do with the money?”

“Don’t make accusations you can’t prove.”

“I’m not accusing you. I’m asking.”

“You’ve always been dramatic.”

The old phrase struck me with unexpected force. Whenever I had questioned him as a child, he had said I was dramatic. If I cried, I was dramatic. If I objected to Tyler taking my things, I was dramatic. If I asked why my mother’s photographs had disappeared from the house, I was too young to understand.

“Did Grandpa ever send money for me?”

My father’s voice lowered.

“He had no right.”

“That still isn’t an answer.”

“I raised you.”

“You did,” I said quietly. “But that doesn’t mean you owned every choice made about my life.”

He hung up.

I stared at the phone until the screen went dark.

The next morning, I rented a small blue sedan and drove north toward Bellmere.