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.

“Why didn’t she?”

Eleanor looked down.

“Because your father told her James had refused to help.”

My throat tightened.

“That wasn’t true.”

“No.”

“Did you tell my grandfather?”

“By the time I learned what had happened, your mother was gone.”

I gripped the back of a chair.

“Why did everyone keep quiet?”

“Because grief makes people afraid. Your grandfather believed he had lost his daughter. Your father believed he was protecting you. Your mother believed she had been rejected.”

“And I was the only person who didn’t know anything.”

Eleanor’s eyes filled with sadness.

“You were a child.”

“I’m not a child now.”

“No,” she said. “You’re not.”

The old cider room stood behind the orchard house, attached to a weathered barn. The air smelled of apples, wood, and dust. Sunlight entered through narrow windows near the ceiling.

At the west window, three rows of brick formed the wall.