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.

“Did he know about the eviction?” I asked.

“He knew you had been put out. He did not know you were sleeping in your car until the attorney located you.”

Richard’s efficiency no longer felt mysterious. It felt connected to years of preparation I had never known existed.

“Why didn’t Grandpa come to me himself?”

Eleanor’s answer took a moment.

“By then, he was too ill to travel. And he believed you might reject him if he appeared without proof.”

“Proof of what?”

“That he had tried.”

I looked toward the darkening orchard.

My grandfather had spent years trying to prove something to a grandson who had never known there was a question.

The office above the packing shed was colder than the house. Dust covered the windowsills, and the shelves held old ledgers bound in cracked brown leather. A single desk sat beneath a hanging lamp.