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.

Eleanor had moved to the window.

“What did he say?”

“There’s a letter from my mother.”

She nodded as if she had been expecting it.

“Do you know what it says?”

“No.”

“Did you know it existed?”

“I knew she wrote something. I didn’t know where it went.”

I looked at her.

“Why did you stay?”

“Stay where?”

“With Grandpa. After all this.”

Eleanor’s face reflected in the dark glass.

“Because he was wrong about many things. But he was not incapable of changing.”

“Did he change?”

“Slowly.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“He stopped speaking about your father as though anger made him righteous. He admitted that his pride had cost him his daughter. He began writing letters without expecting forgiveness.”

“To my mother?”

“To you.”

She walked to a filing cabinet and opened the bottom drawer.

Inside was a stack of notebooks.

“Your grandfather kept journals,” she said. “He asked me to give these to you after you read the letter.”