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.

I have left Nathaniel the truth, but truth is not the same as justice.

He must choose what to do with both.

I closed the notebook.

For the first time since arriving at the house, my anger toward my grandfather shifted. It didn’t disappear. But it made room for something else: grief for the man he had been, and for the person he might have become if he had chosen courage sooner.

That evening, Eleanor made soup and bread. I ate at the long kitchen table while she sat across from me with a cup of tea.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel,” I admitted.

“You don’t have to decide tonight.”

“My father lied about everything.”

“Perhaps not everything.”

“He lied about Grandpa. He lied about the trust. He lied about Mom.”

“He may have told himself different stories.”

“That doesn’t make them less false.”